The Beautiful In-Between

On unfinished things, unfamiliar rhythms, and finding our way through the middle.

I've been having a little trouble finding my rhythm lately.

I came home from Yellowstone with a head full of ideas, a tin full of treasures, and all sorts of creative enthusiasm. I imagined myself settling back into the studio, spreading everything out on the table, and picking up where I'd left off.

Except that's not quite what happened.

Instead, I've been wandering around in a curious state of almost.

Almost ready to begin something. Almost caught up. Almost finding my way back into a familiar routine.

There are projects in various stages of becoming. New things I'm learning to do. Ideas scribbled on scraps of paper and tucked into notebooks. Packages to assemble, words to write, plans to make. Some very exciting things are happening, and I'm genuinely delighted by them.

But lordie, there are a lot of moving parts.

And I haven't quite figured out the choreography.

I've been thinking about this peculiar place we sometimes find ourselves in. The space between what was familiar and what hasn't yet become familiar. Between the beginning of something and the moment when we finally feel at home inside it.

The beautiful in-between.

I'm not entirely sure it feels beautiful while you're standing in the middle of it.

Some days it feels more like walking into a room and forgetting why you came in.

Repeatedly.

But I suspect there's something worth paying attention to here.

The unfamiliar middle

I think we sometimes underestimate how much energy it takes to build a new rhythm.

Even when the things we're building are things we want.

A new project doesn't arrive with its own comfortable routine. Neither does a new way of working, a new creative practice, or a new chapter of our lives.

We have to find our way into them.

And while we're doing that, the familiar things don't necessarily stop needing our attention. The laundry still needs doing. The emails still arrive. The calendar keeps turning its pages.

Meanwhile, we're trying to make room for something that hasn't quite found its place yet.

I think that's where I am.

I'm not short on ideas. Quite the opposite. I have more ideas than I know what to do with, and so many of them feel full of possibility.

What I haven't quite found is the rhythm that will hold them.

And perhaps I've been expecting that rhythm to arrive a little too quickly.

What happens while we're waiting?

Here's something I've noticed about myself.

When I feel a little untethered, my instinct is to organize. Make a list. Rearrange the calendar. Sort the projects into neat categories. Decide what happens on Monday and what happens on Thursday.

And sometimes that's exactly what I need.

But sometimes I wonder whether I'm trying to organize my way out of a perfectly natural part of the creative process.

Because making something new — whether it's a piece of art, a body of work, or a different way of living — involves a certain amount of not knowing.

We begin with an idea of what something might become. We gather materials. We try things. We change our minds. We discover something unexpected.

And somewhere along the way, we find ourselves surrounded by all the pieces, wondering how on earth they're going to fit together.

I know this feeling from making art.

There is almost always a moment when a piece looks like absolutely nothing. The colors aren't quite right. The composition feels awkward. The thing I imagined hasn't materialized.

It's tempting to put it aside and start something else.

But I've learned that sometimes the best thing I can do is leave it on the table.

Look at it when I walk past.

Move one little piece.

Let it be unfinished for a while.

I wonder whether a life can be approached in much the same way.

Not everything needs to become something today

One of the things I love about collecting ordinary life is that it asks so little of us at the beginning.

Notice something.

Pick it up, if it's yours to pick up.

Write it down.

Take a photograph.

Keep it because it interests you, even if you have absolutely no idea what you'll do with it.

There's no requirement to make something wonderful by Friday.

And yet, I sometimes forget to offer myself that same spaciousness in the rest of my creative life.

I want to see how everything connects. I want the new projects to feel familiar. I want the routines to settle into place so I can stop thinking about how to do everything and simply get on with doing it.

But perhaps this is a collecting season, too.

A season of gathering experience. Of noticing what works and what doesn't. Of discovering which ideas have staying power and which ones were only passing through.

A season of learning what this new version of my days might look like.

I don't have to know all of that yet.

I can just keep paying attention.

A little room for the unfinished

So that's where I am today.

Smack dab in the middle of things.

There are projects I'm excited about, work I'm grateful to be doing, and creative ideas tugging at my sleeve. There are also half-finished lists, unfamiliar routines, and a studio table that seems to collect evidence of approximately seventeen different trains of thought.

I'm not writing this from the other side, with a lovely lesson about how I found my balance and everything fell beautifully into place.

I'm writing it from right here.

Where some days feel productive and others feel scattered. Where I'm learning as I go. Where I occasionally wish someone would hand me the instruction manual for this particular chapter.

But I'm beginning to wonder whether there's something lovely about allowing a chapter to unfold before we insist on knowing what it's about.

Maybe the in-between isn't a gap we need to hurry across.

Maybe it's a place worth inhabiting.

A place where we're allowed to experiment, rearrange, reconsider, and begin again. Where the unfinished things can stay unfinished a little longer. Where we can be curious about what's taking shape without demanding that it reveal itself all at once.

I don't know exactly what this season will look like once everything settles.

I'm still in the middle of it.

But today, I think I'll leave a few things on the table. Make a little room for what I haven't figured out. Pay attention to what keeps calling me back.

And see what happens.

Perhaps that's enough for now.