What do you do when you’ve been working on a project for ten months, and more, when you discover you have ‘failed’? What do you do when you set an intention, and the very universe has conspired with you to make it easy for you to hold to it, far easier than it would have been in normal times, and still you have failed? By failure, I don’t mean that you haven’t got the results you wanted, rather that you haven’t held up your part of the bargain, you have failed in the intent.
That’s where I found myself this week.
Almost a year ago, on the 31st of August 2019, I started a words-&-pictures project. The intention was to take a photo in my garden every day and write a few words inspired by it. One picture, a very few words. I think I started with the idea of them being tweetable words and pictures, and so deliberately constrained by that character limit. A few were tweeted in the early days; fewer and fewer as time went on. Not least, because succinctness is a core skill that doesn’t come naturally.
Other writing projects evolved and although I stuck to the basic premise and got into my garden every day to take a photograph or two (or a dozen or so some days) they would accumulate and rather than writing a few words every day, I would find that I had weeks’ worth to catch up on.
But catch up I did. I’d keep coming back to it, determined to finish it. Every so often I got up to date.
I started working up ideas of what I could do with it when it was “finished”. Would anyone want to read it? Would anyone care about those pictures, most of which are not technically brilliant? Would the words ever mean anything to anyone other than me? I had hopes that maybe I could make “something” of it, but that wasn’t really the point.
I remember being in an ancient Buddhist temple in Nepal: in dim light dozens of people were at work. They weren’t salvaging an ancient monument; they were happily repainting the frescoes. Not restoring, not conserving: repainting, making them new again. The value for them wasn’t in the work (the resultant creation), but in the work (the act of creating). It was about input, not output. It is a different mindset. It is one that I intellectually understand, but that my western sensibility which reveres the ‘age’ of a thing, the ‘originality’ of thing, it is also one that I struggle with.
There is a lesson though: sometimes it is the doing of a thing, not the having done it, that matters.
So, this week, on another major catch-up on my garden project I discovered a missing day. A day when I had failed to do the very basic input. I had not one single photograph of my garden. After three hundred and three days – 303! – I missed one.
I went through the files again and again. I checked for past-midnight shots from the previous day, I checked for uploads from the beginning of the next month, and again, and again, but I had to accept it: on 30th June 2020, I had not taken my camera into my garden.
Buggritt millennium hand and SHRIMP!!! [1]
Surprisingly though, that little expleting was the full extent of my disappointment. I can’t even call it anger or dismay. Buggrit millennium hand and shrimpsicals…ok, work with it was pretty much how it went.
I would not have expected this of me. I would have expected more anger, more disappointment, more oh-what’s-the-point-ness. Even now, I wonder if had I hit this point earlier, would I have given the whole project up? I can’t answer that. I suspect not, because when I look back at the photographs, some of them really are poor, and when I look back at the words some of them are clearly make-weights, they do their job, but only just. But I had kept going with it. I had faith in this little project. I knew it had value.
If it turns out there is no value in the result; there is certainly the value in the doing of it…the way it has made me look more closely, the way it has encouraged me to see this project through by way of proof that I can tackle a long-term plan, with patience and commitment, and just by way of the rewards, all the beauty I would not necessarily have noticed, certainly wouldn’t have tried to capture, and maybe a few snippets of beauty or wisdom spun out of my reactions and shared along the way.
My response got practical very quickly. I dithered through the photographs I did have of that day. The reason I had none of the garden was clearly because I’d been long-walking through the cemetery and along the river. Without looking back into my journal, just looking at those shots I knew I’d had a really good day. It was kind of comforting to know that I’d failed because I’d been having fun elsewhere, rather than because I was just moping about doing nowt.
I considered my options.
One was to simply input a blank frame for that day and write some words around that.
Another was to pick another shot from the garden from the day before or day after, knowing that no-one would ever check.
A third was to pick a shot that could conceivably have been from my garden, ditto.
None of those options sat right with me. Instead, I went with the idea of picking the most beautiful view from that day, even though it wasn’t from my garden, and letting the words tell the true story. Faced with a number of ways to patch up a project, I decided to go with the most authentic response. This is what I wrote…
Such a disappointment to find a day – at the end of the 10th month – when I had I failed to capture something from my own garden…but in these lockdown days the paths around the Broad had become second home. And a reminder that a project does not fail, just because we fail to get it exactly right.
It was only after I had written them, that I started to think back to the conception of the project.
At that time, the idea that I would NOT be away from home for more than 24 hours at a stretch for a whole year was inconceivable. When I say that the universe conspired with me, I mean that is it the strange times we’re living in that kept me at home all this time. Had we not been thrown into this particular maelstrom; I would have had weeks away from home – all those trips that got cancelled or postponed. The original conception allowed for that. It allowed that the concept of “my garden” was flexible; it allowed it for being the garden closest to where I woke up or ate lunch or went to bed, it allowed for ‘my garden’ to be any garden that I could claim for my own for an hour or so.
I had forgotten that.
As it became increasingly clear that I would have a whole year, at home, in my garden, I think it became an over-important parameter – yet it was one that was never part of the original project design. It’s too easy to get caught up in the details of a thing, to lose sight of what we had originally set out to achieve…and why. I started the project with no hope of being in my own garden every day – there were so many other places to be – so why would I even quiver at missing one day?
I suspect it is because when things look like becoming something bigger and better or more complete than we originally imagined we lose touch with the original aim, we keep pushing for ‘stretch’ targets (as the management geeks have it) rather than being happy with achieving what we set out to do.
The irony is…that this one picture, which isn’t from my garden at all, is likely to end up being the most beautiful of the year.
So: what you do when you’re ten months into a year-long project and find that you’ve failed, what you do is curse loudly but briefly, then set about revisiting your original parameters where you might find that it doesn’t count as a ‘fail’ at all…or maybe you find some other way of turning it into a ‘success’…
This is where this piece should have ended. Except I caught up a bit further and found that on the 16th July it would seem that I had not picked up my camera at all. Not in the garden, not on a walk, not even indoors. Zilch. Nada. That one will have to be either a blank frame or a next-day cheat. I’ll have to think about it.
[1] As a Pratchett fan, I have adopted Foul Ole Ron’s catchphrase as my personal expletive of choice. Emphasis varies and is my own.
