Sometimes you have to finish something not because you have anything new to offer it, but because it has something to offer you. If we jumped up and abandoned our commitments every time we ran out of novelty, we wouldn’t learn anything.
Starting anything new is fun. You’re full of inspiration and ideas. Every moment you spend on it, whether it’s a relationship or a project, feels like an act of self expression, and that’s because it is. You’re giving a lot in the beginning, and it’s fun. A huge part of maintaining stamina for a long project is getting rest from it.
After getting a break, though, the project seems smaller.
When you are inside a problem, everything aspect of it is big and important. After stepping away it seems trivial. You can’t see the consequence of what you’re doing. It seems to have no purpose. All the effort, time and even vulnerability that you invested in the project suddenly seems like a waste, and that is hard to confront.
This presents an enormous challenge when you’re trying to get back in the game. Some people find this haunting them not only for a single project, but in returning to a particular lifestyle or art practice. We get disillusioned by more experience and even desire for more experience.
The novelty won’t necessarily come back when you get back to work. In fact, it’s likely that it won’t. What happens may not be as exciting but it is at least as valuable: if you insist on returning to your passion, it will have something entirely new to teach you about yourself. You’ll get sudden insights or understandings. You’ll have an easy opportunity to face things about yourself. Some that were difficult and too hard to bear before, and some that were great but just hidden from view.
