The Undone
Within all of us lies a realm both familiar and mysterious. At some level, we sense its presence, but its dimensions and shape seem unknowable. We fear this realm, but each one of us has created it ourselves. Without wanting to, we expand its borders by the day, allowing it to encroach on our well being, peace of mind and sense of self.
Behind its walls are the things we have not done, avoid doing and doubt we’ll ever do. It is the realm of temporarily abandoned, not-discarded intentions. This is the realm of The Undone.
The Undone is a shapeless, murky region within our minds. Despite continuously thinking and doing to keep ahead of its expanding borders, we are always running, looking over our shoulders as it nips at our heels.
The Undone occupies brain-space, sucking up precious bandwidth, lurking in the subconscious and poking into consciousness whenever we try to relax.
You might not consider yourself a hoarder. While your environment might be free from piles of clutter, your mind can be jam-packed with ideas, intentions, partially fleshed-out thoughts and tentative plans that have piled up .
Intention hoarding is not something we do consciously. They accumulate slowly over time, are not visible or tangible and you don’t stumble over them as you make your way from the couch to the kitchen.
They do, however, become obstacles. And because there’s limited room within your skull, piles of maybe-someday-actions-in-waiting obstruct your flow of thought. Stacks of things to be done, planned, contemplated and reality-tested impede mental movement, tripping up your logical, practical, reasonable lines of thinking that might lead to useful actions.
If we do not intend to hoard intentions, then why do we do it?
It starts when we’re young. We’re taught that thinking is good, to use our minds and figure things out. And it works for a while.
We learn to speak, read and write. We build things, take them apart and understand how they work. We are praised, scolded, encouraged and discouraged, but always told that with enough thoughtful consideration, we will accomplish whatever we set our minds to.
At some point, we have more ideas than we can realistically test. Some of these are good ideas, so we don’t want to let them go. We’re told to hold onto our dreams, which is a magical term for ethereal nerve connections untethered to reality - however amorphous they may be - and eventually they’ll come to fruition. When the time is right, we will retrieve our good intentions, one by one, and make them happen.
In other words, we are advised to hoard our intentions. To throw them out would be to admit defeat.
When we’re children, our cache of potentially good ideas waiting to be tested is manageable. We have all the time in the world - or at least the rest of our lives - to make them happen.
But as we learn and grow, our ideas, and therefore our tentative plans to implement them multiply, as the time we have to put them into practice gets squeezed. School, work, relationships, creative and recreational endeavors distract us. In other words, life happens.
So while we’re living life, thinking and doing and learning and loving, we continue to come up with things we intend to get to at some point when we have more time. The pace of our thinking, however, exceeds the speed of time, just as the number of our neural connections exceeds that of all atoms in the known universe.
Our minds do not bite off more than they can chew, but they churn out more than we can do.