Not Finishing

I don’t finish stuff that I start, that’s my thing and it’s also my life’s truest philosophy. Many people may see this as a failure on my part, I pity them for they do not know the true joy that comes with the simple act of leaving something incomplete.

I was not always this way, once I was like the rest of you; determined, single minded and driven towards a particular goal. Oh! what a fool I was back then. To clarify I will explain why I stopped this narrow mindset and moved on to a higher plain of mental existence.

As people who have known me for a long time will be aware I used to be a competitive paralympic swimmer. I started swimming before I could walk and following my accident when I couldn’t walk easily again I returned to the pool as part of my recovery. I got good at it without any informal coaching and was devastating at school swimming events, I didn’t lose a race through my primary school years, baring in mind that I was keeping against full able bodied kids.

When I was about 8 I joined a competitive swimming team and we would train 3 times a week after school at one of the local swimming pools. Outside of school competitions and having had no formal training in swimming I was hopelessly outgunned and lost quite a few races miserably, mainly due to a lack of stamina and having no race tactics (I used to lead until the last lap and then fade away and finish 3rd and 2nd a lot). However with the training and the patient work of Doug my coach I got better and by the time I was about 13 or 14 I was starting to consistently win at county championship levels.

Unfortunately for me I was also at a very academic secondary school and the teachers had high hopes for me to do well their also. At 14 you are coming into the run of the English school system where they start preparing you for GCSE exams. These are probably the most important exams, as everyone in the country is supposed to take them. They are the marker for whether or not you can go forward to higher education like A-levels and if you don’t they highly influence who will employ you.

To cut a long story short I was asked to make a choice at this point between going full blown with my training for the swimming. This means training 5 days a week possibly twice a day, morning and evening. I had 3 close friends for the swimming club who did this, all 3 of them went to the Olympics at some point or another 1 won Gold, 1 won Bronze and the other didn’t place. That was the aim of my coach to try and get us to Olympic competition standards. My parents didn’t push me and left me to make a free choice on this. I chose not to go for the win I chose not to finish this, I left this half done. I still trained and competed and kicked some ass in school events but I decided that I didn’t want my knowledge and intellect to suffer for the sake of finishing this.

This has been my philosophy ever since, I would rather do a little bit of many different and varied things, than become a specialist at one thing at the expense of others. I am not a specialist academic, I did a mixture of sciences and arts into senior education. Even doing History at university I would quite happily take modules from different fields, be it biology, geography, philosophy etc. I am still not what I would call a specialist historian, it is the subject I enjoy the most certainly but I would never want to become a specialist expert in one field like my professors.

This is also the reason why I play several musical instruments to a reasonable standard but none of them what I would call expertly. It is the reason I have started novels and poems and left them unfinished if I found something else interesting. It is why I have been in successful bands and quite happily walked away from them to try something different (I walked straight out of a very promising rock band into a jazz band, switching instruments in the process). It also the reason I had no problem leaving this blog for over a month without updating.

I recently read an article about what happens to those people who do finish things properly who do reach the mountain top… they hate it. Once you have got there, what do you do? There is nothing for you to do now. If you are a swimmer and you beat the world record and win that Gold medal, you have done what you set out to achieve and now… You are left being good at only one thing, one thing that you have enjoyed because you had something to focus you and something to aim towards. You leave yourself with a set of skills unsuited to anything else. Many people, athletes, writers, composers and the like fall into bleak depression once they have succeeded and may never be the same person again. One of my friends who I mentioned above, who went to the Olympics now works at a supermarket trying to save up some money so she can go to Uni to get a qualification. A qualification to do sports, so she can train other people to take the same route as her; to me that seems like madness.

The same can be said of true love and companionship. Love is a rare find and something that is always new and fresh and exciting. To me every day with her is like discovering something new again and that is where true happiness lies.

The true joy for me in life is knowing that there is always something out there that I haven’t tried. Something that is new and exciting to stimulate my mind with and have a good crack at. I may not be the best at it and may not finish it once I start it, but there will always be something else for me afterwards. Because I keep an open mind, because I refuse to finish anything.

Music:

That said without people who do go to the top and finish something properly I wouldn’t be able to enjoy this song! I respect and appreciate these guys, I just don’t want to be them. Also this is close to the most pretentious video you will every see, I suggest you close your eyes for the first listen as the song is brilliant (Grammy winner? Oh yeah!) and then watch the video the 2nd time around and laugh heartily at it. Even Steve Vai himself does these days!