#patience

There is a shelf here of things abandoned: two half-built programs, a translation that stalled at the third page, and a set of notes for an essay I no longer agree with. For years I thought of it as evidence of failure.

I have changed my mind. The shelf is where the ideas go that were not wrong, only early. Twice now something from it has come back and finished itself quickly, because the difficult part had already been done and left to cool.

The condition is that the shelf must stay visible. Abandoned work hidden in an archive is simply lost; abandoned work in plain sight is a standing offer. I walk past it most days, and every so often it accepts.