Life can easily become overly complicated, big, and scary. Whenever that happens, I find myself focusing in on much smaller matters. That’s why I’d like to talk a bit about the value of little projects in this post.
I’m talking about low-stakes creative projects that I find fun, useful, and satisfying. They may pertain to something I already enjoy, or they could be something new to me. Unlike anything involving work, school, or some other obligation, I decide what projects I undertake, to what extent, in what ways, and for how long. That prevents me from feeling pressured to do them in a certain way or for anybody else’s approval; whatever happens, I’ve only got to please myself with the results, and that is tremendously freeing.
These are especially beneficial when I feel stressed about some bigger issues in my life and need something easy and lighthearted to reduce stress and give me a small victory. That seems to be when I take on more such projects than usual. Sometimes they occupy more of my time than the bigger issues hanging over my head as the smaller projects are much easier to handle. That feeling of accomplishment can lift my spirits and remind me what I can do enough to get me through the larger, more stressful issues at hand. Even doing the laundry can check all those boxes. Laundry is a particularly good example since the washer and dryer do most of the work, it’s easy and fairly quick, there’s less of a mess after doing laundry, and I then have more clean clothes to wear when the laundry is done.
I felt inspired to write about this after starting my current project of removing rust from parts of my giraffe unicycle and a few other things. Much to my delight, the Evapo-Rust I tried worked wonderfully! Beyond that, it’s been fun to look into this stuff that I had hardly any interest in until the last few weeks. While there’s still much more that I don’t know about it, I now know far more than I did before I started this journey.
Another example is the cardboard shirt folder I made last December based on this YouTube tutorial. I had a lot of fun making it, about as much fun using it, and love seeing the end results, which are much better than I can get when I fold shirts by hand. It was a nice little project to work on while still feeling upset over my grandmother’s death a few months earlier.
I’ve taken on lots of small projects since my dog Sawyer died. A recent realization is that the daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly routines I’ve developed to keep Sawyer’s memory alive are small projects of sorts. I always feel better after completing them, I often look forward to doing them again, and my doing them has little to no impact on anybody else. Also, and along with the other small projects I’ve undertaken, they help ground me, give me something nice to focus on in a world that seems to relish obsessing over negativity, and make my life better overall. I love them and look forward to continuing them.