The never ending list of “jobs to be done”

Yet another Monday and yet another week. After a reasonably relaxed Sunday ( if you count washing bathrooms and cleaning cupboards relaxing!)  I woke up refreshed to seize the day and seize  my “to do list”  that seems to be growing longer by the day. There were so many jobs to be done, so many jobs to be completed and so many jobs to begin doing. I often feel that I will go through life and still have an endless lists of jobs that are still to be done. Does this mean that I am biting more than I can chew? Does this mean that I am highly inefficient or over ambitious? Or does this mean that I am incapable of doing half the things I want to do?  Pondering over these questions and wondering which of the jobs to start off with, I came across this message in my Twitter feed. Voila! I had the answer thanks to Erica Jong who put it so succinctly.

The root cause

Falling back on Freud and his psychology, obviously everything can be traced back to one’s childhood and beyond. Growing up in a a non digital age when TVs and phones did not exist,  in my home, we were encouraged to take up hobbies. During holidays which came twice a year, we were motivated to  engage in worthwhile projects. Of course we were allowed to choose what we wanted to do and the first day of the holiday we got all the material together. Depending on my interest at that time, I did a photography project one year where I used my box camera to record our holiday, another year I made cross stitch embroidered table mats, one year  I pressed flowers from neighbourhood gardens and made a detailed album with the botanical name of each specimen. But with each passing year as my interests became more and more complex and the projects more and more ambitious, there soon grew a pile of unfinished projects that my mother still has,  kept away somewhere in a bundle, in the hope that at least my children will finish them.

Similarly, after I got married I continued with my stitching and knitting and painting and photography and kept stuffing things in the cupboard – dresses that just needed to be hemmed, quilts that needed to be finished, stamp albums that need to be re-organised, books that need to be kept in some order, photos that needed to be sorted and  kept in albums , and even now –  a BLOG that still needs to be organised.

This feeling of inadequacy is enhanced when I see people showcasing their own projects and people  oohing and aahing over their talents.

[ctt title=”When will I be able to show off my projects too? ” tweet=”When will I be able to show off my projects too? ” coverup=”_Ib45″]

But now, thanks to Erica Jong and her timely quote, I can tell my mom to clear out her attic and rid my own cupboards of the unfinished projects.

[ctt tweet=”After all, some projects are just never meant to be finished isn’t it? ” coverup=”5X3fw”]

These are my Monday morning thoughts that I’m linking up with #MondayMusings hosted by Corinne of Write Tribe