Projected living

I talk a lot about my projects, some that are big and important, and also those that aren’t. There are all sorts of reasons why I do that (not the least being that, ya know, I’m a blogger…), but the truly important thing about it for me is that those projects provide signposts of a sort, marking my progress on my journey. Recently, there’s been a bit of a shift in the focus of my projects—small, even subtle, but that shift’s important, too.

For most of the first two years after Nigel died, my projects have been about building my new life, often literally—things like getting my house the way I want it, sorting through and reducing the mountains of stuff he and I accumulated over 24 years, and also getting things working (phone, TV, weather station, etc). Other things, like my cooking experiments, have been about doing things that interest me and move me forward in building whatever my life will become (I actually didn’t even know I was all that interested in cooking until I was cooking only for myself). However, all those projects were still related to the life I had, building on that base.

The change is that I’m now taking on projects that are only about me. The shift really began with my Mac project (YOMP). It started out as just another “based on my old life” project, but it’s grown beyond that into something I’m keenly interested in because it’s something I want to do. In fact, it’s now grown beyond just getting the Mac Classic to work so I can access old files, now it’s become about something I want, and stuff that’s about me.

It’s not all about tech stuff, either: My recent project to the replace the wheels of my mobile filing drawers was something I didn’t have to do—I could’ve just tossed it out, or left in the garage to deal with later. But it was something I wanted to to do mainly because I could. It was only when I started working on it that I realised how I could use the repaired drawer unit to better organise my office—though, as with so many other projects dealing with “stuff” in the house, that’s not been a huge priority for me (in fact, I haven’t used all the storage I’ve already created for myself in my office).

Now, sure, I freely admit that this is partly about having a diversion from those mind-numbing, never-ending bigger projects (especially the garage and the gardens), but it’s become an important way for me to carve out space for myself, to stake out some of the boundaries of what my new life may become. It’s also helped me catch glimpses of at least some of what my new life may one day be like. Those are not small things.

While all that’s been gong on, I’ve also had a slight reemergence of interest in some of the activities I used to enjoy—like blogging, for example, and obviously: No matter how many posts I do in what’s left of this month, September is already my most-blogged month of the year. That doesn’t mean that 2021 will be a return to those golden days of yesteryear when I did an average of one blog post a day: To achieve that I’d have to hit an average of roughly two posts per day, every day, for the rest of the year. That seems highly improbable. But, next year, maybe? That’s at least theoretically possible, and the fact that I can see that it’s theoretically possible is just another example of how things are changing.

Over the course of this month in particular, I’ve talked about some of the things that have changed and shifted, and a little about why it’s happened. There’s so much more to say about all that, and over time, I will—especially as I manage to figure it out. I guess my own life has become my biggest project of all. And I’m okay with that.