Altars to Almost

I counted forty-seven.

Forty-seven things I was almost ready to finish. Some of them had been in draft mode for so long I had forgotten what problem they were solving when I started. But I kept them. I could not delete them because deleting them would mean admitting they were not going to happen, and as long as they existed in the folder they were still potential and potential cannot fail.

I finally understood that potential costs something. Not today, not in any visible way, but over the years it costs you the experience of being someone whose word to himself holds. Every unfinished thing teaches you, quietly, that you are the kind of person who does not finish. That lesson compounds.

You have one altar I am thinking of. The one you know about. Not the ones that were just thinking out loud. The one that has been almost-ready for a year and a half, that you mention less often now because mentioning it means having to explain why it is still in draft mode.

Write one more page this week. Not to finish it. To prove to yourself that you can still move it.

The next chapter is about what freedom felt like before I understood what freedom was.

— Job