At any given moment I have more maybe-projects at early, sapling (and seedling) stages than projects I actually work on for a living, or those I enjoy as full-blown habits and hobbies that have matured to the point that I could casually tell you how they work, what they do for me, and where they’re headed.

I like this kind of setup! I like tending to a greenhouse filled with possibility and unknowns.

There are several keystone growths that hold everything else together, feeding and fueling and in some cases serving as living scaffoldings for neighboring fauna.

But the space is primarily defined by vernality and fresh-buds that can be more readily pulled out, swapped in, rearranged, and culled back into the soil than their sprawling, aged, and systemically enmeshed kin.

The trick to maintaining this sort of enthusiasm-hothouse is sustaining a sense of possibility, probability, practicality, and capacity.

There’s only so much time, energy, and resources to go around, and that means being willing to get wholeheartedly excited about something, introducing it into the ecosystem of your life, and then being really honest with yourself about whether that new interest makes sense within the overall motif—or if it’s maybe a nice (even fantastic) idea that doesn’t work with everything else you have going on at the moment.

The metrics you use to determine what’s what can change over time, of course, and periodically you’ll find yourself with a new bloom that demands you untangle and rearrange the rest of the space—even the towering fiddle-leafs and rubber tree plants—to account for this fresh plantlet’s obvious, near-future centrality.

And there will be moments in which the existing ecosystem no longer makes sense, no longer resonates with who you’ve become since you orchestrated them into their current arrangement.

What’s nice about tending to saplings amidst sturdier, more-developed, ever-evolving systems, though, is that they can be treated as constituents of a more cohesive (existing or potential) biome: a bunch of breezy, vital verbs, not demanding, unwieldy nouns.

They’re not rooted realities, then, but they still lend their essence to the larger pattern, and that makes it easier to tweak and trim and shape the flow of which they’re a part, rather than attempting to manipulate a gordian knot of new and existing elements, ponderously and imperfectly assessing each piece’s impact on the grand structure of which they’re a (perhaps temporary) component.

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