What's Done

Sometimes the Big Picture gets away from me. I lose my place in line, forget what the point was, digress into the minutia that is my daily life: the spilled ink, the stray bits of thread, the distraction of national drama and dishes piled in the sink. What is all this? I ask, and where did my Big Life go?

I had this Grand Idea a few weeks back, and it was Exciting and Important (well, to me, anyway), and I called upon the winds of Imagination and Visualization to fill my sails and get me out of harbor, and now, a few short weeks into it, I'm back to using my oars and feeling silly out here in the middle of the ocean, bobbing like a cork, no land in sight.

Artists don't dream of making great art, say the authors of Art & Fear, they dream of having made great art. Or, as Dorothy Parker put it, I hate to write. I love having written.

I visualize the end product, but not the daily process. That's my error. Because one page at a time, one sentence at a time, it's the doing that matters. What's done is just... done.