This year I started out with a phrase. The phrase was "Say yes to less." So far it's going poorly. Tonight I spent some time reflecting on that and a few other things. Employing the macabre but scarily-useful technique of imagining I'm at the end of my life and looking back, I realized that one thing I need to do better is just let (most) ideas be ideas.

Ideas are a hot commodity, though. People want them. People feel bad if they don't have them. There is an overwhelming desire and pressure to make real an idea, in varying capacities. Whether one feels an idea should be realized for money, status, security, or some kind of meta-reasoning: people want ideas and they want to turn them into something.

What you make as a person doesn't define your worth as a person.

It's a nice statement, and one that I wish I could better internalize sub-rationally. Instead, for a long time I've been stuck in the "what I've made is what I'm worth" trap, and I am constantly accepting new ideas and trying to shove them, whether they like it or not, into the "make-a-thing" machine.

Until now, all ideas have been birds in the daylight and I am watching all of them, studying them intently. And what I want now is for all ideas to become like bats in the night. I want to just hear the fluttering of their wings, shadows of twilight, as they swoop in to get their evening food and then disappear before it gets much darker.

More simply, it's time to let go of a few things. To make room for other more important things. This is difficult to do, and I find pretty much most of the fibers of my being (not every) are fighting against it. But, when I imagine myself somewhere down the line, well, I know what's going to matter. And I don't want to get lost in this stuff for so much longer.

How can you let an idea go? How can you tell it "Thank you for showing up. Thank you for staying for a little moment" and then show it to the door?

Probably the same way you let any other thing go. You grieve.