The Project Project: What's Up With That?

I'm tired of immediacy.

Even more so, I'm tired of my own personal need for immediacy, to produce complete and finished pieces of work in every aspect of my life.  

I see this weariness most people; the rush towards completing a task in order to move onto, and complete, the next one.  It's my belief that we are a product obsessed society, more focused on giving reverence to the product than to the process.  There's a comfort in having something to show for the work that you've done, whether the result is negative or positive because it gives us something concrete to talk about and share with others.    

But we are always working on Something.  And while those Somethings have little goals we aim to accomplish, the longer journey of their completion and existence is often lost.  If Life is a journey and the projects that we pick up along the way are ones we choose to do because they're an extension of ourselves, then shouldn't there be just as much focus on the process as the product it produces?

That's why I started The Project Project, a long term experiment in which I will interview a person/band/collective every other week about a project they're working on and follow up with them once a year for the next three years.

Basically that's 25 different projects being tracked over a three year period.

That's a lot of  work horror excitement 

Definition of the word project: An individual or collaborative enterprise planned and designed to achieve an aim.

As you can see by the definition I copy and pasted straight out of a Google search, anything can be defined as a project as long as its purpose is to achieve an aim.  I'm interpreting it broadly and loosely so as to include as many different types of people as possible from as many different fields as I can.   This is not only so I can have different perspectives represented, but so theatre artists, doctors, scientists, bakers, musicians and athletes  all have a chance to c0-exist together and have their stories told and followed.  

We often get so entrenched in our own communities that we wind up knowing little else about the reality of other careers other than how they're poorly creatively portrayed on television and in the movies.  I not only want to learn about other people's lives, but hope that this project will bridge gaps between communities and allow them into other people's  worlds.  This will hopefully allow stereotypes to be smashed and perspectives to be widened by the participants and by those who follow the project as well.

Will this be a success?  

We'll find out in three years.

But for now, I hope you enjoy the journey.