To Build a Stable for Frantic Horses

Morning Thoughts #246

Let this short essay not be evidence of that which I write against. Help me, Lord, to feel less the urge, the need to complete on a smaller time scale. What I begin today, I too often end as well. And not to say, sometimes successfully. But what I want to work toward is more meaningful middle days. Days that do not question whether they are part of a larger project. They wake and go to sleep utterly belonging to it.

Days that do not rush themselves beyond their own inner excitement. For excitement is always a rush, but that does not mean rushing any faster than inspiration allows. Sometimes the issue with the deeply embedded need to finish is that we outpace our own inspiration. And anyone who has ever known inspiration knows that it can be frantic, utterly frantic. This franticness is oftentimes exhilarating. Working frantically, as long as it is still working fully, is good and sometimes the best.

The issue arises when we harness an organic frantic moment but then, wishing to reach our destination even faster, demand it complete the work of three horses. Assuming said franticness is a horse, we whip it into a speed it cannot sustain. It gets to a point where it can no longer move forward, a place we then rename “destination”. But it was not where we set out for, not where this particular inspiration horse would have taken us if left to its own frantic devices without the excess of our particular finishing complex.

The need to be finished is a kind of complex, a neurosis of productivity, but in a superficial sense. And yet, here I am, feeling finished. Oh, espresso-driven moment of insight, may this be where you always intended to drop me. I know myself, and as such, I have my doubts. But I pray it to be so.