thoughts, words, deeds

consider the progress of the planets

Prompt: What is your personal definition of progress?

This isn’t a word that I think very much about, but I think the working definition I’d come up with is growth or movement. Preferably the measurable kind, although that is questionable. For example, I knit, and one of the shawls that I made was a circular shawl. Each row at the end was progress, around a circle over seven hundred stitches long and adding less than a millimeter to the diameter to the shawl—but that was still progress, even though it was hard to measure by the eye or when showing to friends and fellow knitters. This is the same kind of progress that can be measured in the growth of a tree, although I wouldn’t necessarily consider that as progress, simply because it is not conscious.

I think the most important thing to remember about progress—even when it’s on a story that progressed as I cut page after page in process of revision, getting shorter all the time, implies getting better, and that implies growth in the sense of conscious effort in learning and knowledge.