Fear of Completion

For much of my life I had trouble finishing things. I would start on a project, like making a quilt, and devote hours to it. Then I would find myself slowing down as I neared the end, and it would often just sit there, unfinished, for months or years. Sometimes forever.

Then one day I realized that I had a fear of completion: there was an image in my mind of the perfect finished product, and I was sure that what I was doing would never match that image, so I preferred incompletion, where I could continue to dream of perfection, rather than finish and realize my imperfection.

The aphorism “the perfect is the enemy of the good” seems apropos here.

Just recently I ran into a musician acquaintance and he told me how he just didn’t seem able to finish writing the songs he started. “They didn’t sound good enough to keep working on them,” he said. I told him how my musician husband, over the years, had recorded his songs and consistently hated the sound of the recording. Then, years later, he’d listen to the cassette tape or CD and say, “you know, this is pretty good.”

A component of universal human insanity is self-hatred. All of us are encumbered with doubts and insecurities.

It’s like there’s two parts of us. One is vibrant and alive and creative, wanting to share our vision with the world. The other part is fearful and dark and suspicious, sure that our vision is silly or worthless or stupid. This part convinces us that if we express ourselves we’ll be shot down as a fool—“you actually thought that was of value?!”—so we shut ourselves down. We censor ourselves.

Some years ago I produced a weekly one-hour TV show, and simultaneously wrote a weekly opinion column for a local newspaper. I was forced to get over my fear of completion! I learned how to just do the best I could, because I didn’t have time to hone anything to perfection. And one of the benefits was that by completing one thing, I opened up the space for something new. I found that all of that incompletion acted like a plug, blocking creativity and expression.

Why Do I Keep Acting Stupid?

Recently a question was posed by a visitor that is all-too-familiar to me personally: “I’ve read Ekhart Tolle, and other spiritual tomes, I intellectually agree—I “get it”—so how come I keep doing the same stupid things over and over again?”

Now the classic answer to this dilemma is “You obviously haven’t sufficiently committed to dropping your shit!” Or:  “You haven’t been willing to undergo the discomfort of changing an unproductive pattern of behavior.” In other words, you’re a lazy worthless piece of crap.

I’ve spent almost forty years developing what I believe to be a profoundly logical way of looking at life; written books and a hundred songs about expanded consciousness—yet every blessed day I act like a flaming asshole in some way or another. The self-damning question is, “If you know so goddamned much, why don’t you LIVE it?

Patience

Realizing that I am insane, that I’m confused about reality, has made it easier to question my beliefs and assumptions—if I’m insane how right can I be about anything? One result is that I’ve realized how deluded I’ve been about myself. I have been blind to certain aspects of my personality my entire life!

In We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity I talk about how I thought for a long time that I wasn’t a competitive person and how startling it was when I realized that self-assessment is wrong. I am in fact a very competitive person. As long as I was convinced that my subjective belief “I am not competitive” was an objective fact, I was completely kidding myself. Now that I have exposed this belief as a lie, I may still be competitive but at least I am not so deluded about who I am.

Recently I have faced another area where I was mistaken about myself: patience. If you had asked me a few months ago if I was a patient person, I would have answered, “yes, I have a lot of patience.” One of my hobbies is weaving, and when people learn how many hours it takes just to set the loom up before weaving even starts, they can’t imagine having the patience to do that.

I hate to lose things because I feel that searching for a lost item is a frustrating waste of time and energy. As a consequence I am very organized and can almost always put my hands on anything in a very short time, no matter how long it’s been since that thing has been used.

I think of time and energy as finite resources that are extremely valuable, and I think I am right to conserve them, not squander them. So I feel justified in criticizing people who are sloppy and careless with their time and energy, particularly when their inefficiency impacts my life! If I’m impatient with their inefficiency, that’s not my problem, it’s their’s.