On Being Content

“There you are,” the frog said. “A nice big juicy fly. And it’s freshly killed, not stale. Which would you rather have, the fly or the stale bread?”
”I’ll take the bread, I think” Ivan said.

”There, you see? Just as I expected. You’re not quite ready to trade places with me yet, whereas I would trade places with you in an instant. A warm straw mattress and a loaf of stale bread - now there’s the stuff of paradise!”
”I never thought of it that way” Ivan said.
from Fortune of a Fool by Nicholas Yermakov (Dragon #94)

I’ve been having a “crisis” lately. I’ve got a few projects in a state of incompleteness. These unfinished projects are annoying me, a lot. And I keep thinking to myself, I really should just stop and finish these. Some would call this a pile of shame, others a pile of potential.

Every time I look at my collection of half painted buildings, or my army of space orks, or my primed but unpainted minotaurs, or my unpainted eldar from 1999. Literally, I picked them up a few weeks before I married my wife from the local game store. It was probably 2,000 points of models at the time.

I learned a lot of things from the story mentioned above. The main one being: Be Happy. Why do I let all these projects consume my mind? You know why I haven’t painted those eldar? I’m not inspired by them. They don’t make me happy. One day maybe they will. Maybe they won’t. I’ve sold some, traded others, and 3d printed more options to go with them. Some of those things I don’t have the skills to paint them the way I want to.

So I print and paint things that make me happy. And I try to learn a little more about painting. Will I ever feel like I’m a good enough painter to actually bring my Avatars of Khaine to life? I don’t know.

You know what though, I’m going to be happy with my collection, and I’m going to keep getting a little better every week until I feel like I can do them justice.

And in the meantime, I’m going to continue to collect models both physical and digital that make me happy. Who knows, maybe I’ll even finish those eldar that i started in on 26 years ago.