To finish is to celebrate what comes next.

Are we ever really finished? With anything?

To finish one moment or project, to put a period on that chapter, is to acknowledge the next moment.

When we reach the end of an experience, the finish is a culmination of all the energy that led us to that moment. How can we say we are finished with it? That creation, and its completion, will remain a part of us forever.

But we can use the finish to motivate us, and energize the next moment.

What if, instead of taking our foot off the gas, we accelerate into the finish and embrace the inertia of this culmination of creativity, and allow it to propel us into the early stages of the next moment? We could energize the process of beginning again, often the most difficult task; we could fire up the curiosity and our ability to connect dots as we start over; we could engage the doubt and fear of failure as we move on, instead of being paralyzed by it.

If we understand that we are the masterpiece, and that all the energy we generate, all the work we do, everything we create, is but a simple sentence in our story, we will take the pressure off the finish line, and ultimately spend more time creating, iterating, and finishing projects.

If we can see each of our creations as a brush stroke in the masterpiece we’re becoming, maybe we can take some pressure off the process and remove the need to perfect as part of that movement toward the finish line.

If we can take some pressure off the drive to perfect as we finish, we ultimately make the start of the next project easier.

If the beginning becomes easier, we can embrace the process, and enjoy it more; we can embrace the interruptions and recognize them as essential inspiration.

If we can understand that the masterpiece we are becoming is a collection of work, all in different degrees of completion, we can find a way to begin and finish more chapters in this never-ending volume of work.

Certainly, there is value in defining an end, in finishing a project: the pressure is essential to the creative process as it opens new pathways and delivers new ways of seeing things. But somewhere, within each project, we have to know there's a footnote hidden within the text that will always allow space and potential for what comes next.