Whatever I’m working on ends up on my desk, as if my mind is offloading whatever it is carrying onto it. As the days pass, there’s less space for me to write my morning pages, rest my elbow, and put a cat who’s come to visit me. I’ll eventually hit a tipping point and stop everything I’m doing to organize myself.
What “organizing myself” actually means is putting things in piles, held together with really good intentions. It could also mean putting stacks of paper into the desk’s cupboard, knowing full well that I’ll never reach for them again, until it comes time to throw them away. Even then, I’ll run the papers through the shredder because they must’ve been important enough for me to hold on to.
For the last couple of days, prototypes of the laser-cut pencil box that I’ve been working on have started gathering. More accurately, the failed parts of the prototypes of the laser-cut pencil boxes have ended up on my desk. I learn something new with each iteration. Today, I realised that it’s okay to test an idea with a small section instead of doing a full run that won’t end up working.
I have to believe in myself, don’t I? Testing an idea first is just good practice and says nothing about my abilities. Does it?
Now, there’s a close-to-finished version of the pencil box sitting on my desk. There are things that I’d like to adjust. Some are because I’m lazy, others are functional improvements, and the rest are mostly aesthetic. It fascinates me how much can be overlooked on such a seemingly simple thing. Afterall, it’s just a box.
Our powers of observation are limited. What we see of the world is just a sliver of what is in front of us. So many things go unnoticed, yet we still feel able to articulate a complete picture, the missing details left out as if they never existed. Each new experience, each new observation, adds to the growing pile in our minds. Inevitably, we forget something, purging it because we don’t recognize its value. The collection of wanting ideas creates for us our own little box to carry for when we need a tool.
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