I spoke with my dad on Sunday. We talked about many things, but the notion of 'projects' came up repeatedly. I was expressing to him that I don't know what my current project is. I am hanging paintings at a coffee shop in about a month, and I feel myself wanting to pivot artistically. I don't feel inclined to condense my graduate school integration paper into a piece of publishable writing, as my professor suggested. I do want to write and attempt to publish at some point. But truthfully I am still sitting with all the ambivalence that I feel about engaging with the academic world. It isn't clear to me that publishing in some psychology, psychotherapy, or philosophy journal is a very meaningful enterprise.
My dad pointed out that it was peculiar, or interesting, or curious, that I found myself so badly in want of a project. I pointed out that he, too, has projects. But he said that his projects are more modest: 'I want to work on my car,' 'I want to paint some trees,' 'I want to build a table.' My projects are of a more scholarly and philosophical bent. I have produced many large writing projects over the last ten years that span somewhere between 1,000 - 1,500 pages of writing. I just looked at my old blog, www.civilizedriley.blogspot.com and clicked on the tag 'Substantial Essay'. I immediately encountered several long pieces of writing that I had entirely forgotten about.
Why in the world am I always producing all these writings? What is going on? Why as I've grown older do I hesitate more to produce them?
I had the idea that part of what I want from a project is an experience of wholeness. Projects are, in some ways, extensive reports on a body of experiences that I have had. I move outside of myself and take stock. Collingwood talks this way about philosophical systems in his Essay on Philosophical Method: A philosophical system is nothing but an intermediary report on the progress that mind has made up until that point. All of this sounds very Hegelian.
A project allows me to stop and look upon my work as though it were done in the process of it still happening. A project is like hades: My life is over and I'm alive to enjoy it. A project allows me to die and be dead.
My final graduate school paper was such a project. That part of my life was over with that project. I was standing at the end of that experience, and I was looking back, with everything I had carried until that point. That is probably part of why I cried so much writing it, writing about my clients from my internship.
I can only conclude that I have not lived enough yet to have another project. I need to keep having experiences, reading books, meeting people, making art, working my job in forensic mental health. These things will crystallize when it is time.
It is not yet time.
There are other ways to feel whole, but there is nothing quite like the next Great Report.
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