The project is coming to an end. No great flourish, no declaration of principle, just the fairly ordinary recognition that something I've been doing has reached the point where carrying on no longer makes much sense. A sand mandala is the nearest image I can find. Monks spend days arranging coloured grains into an intricate pattern and then, once it's complete, brush the lot away. The idea was never that the design should outlast the people who made it.

What it was, more or less

V2Melody began as a retirement experiment: taking poems I already liked, or had come across and wanted to look at more carefully, and setting them to music with the tools that had suddenly become available. The results went on a free site, with no adverts and no accounts required. In time, it grew into a fair number of tracks, some better than others, with biographies and notes alongside. It gave me a reason to read more slowly and listen more closely than I'd managed for years. That was useful while it lasted.

Whatever value there was lay in the making, rather than the archive. Once a setting was finished and somewhere anyone who wanted it could find it, that particular job was done. Keeping the server ticking over, renewing the domain and having that little thought at the back of my mind that something needed attention didn't bring any further insight. It just kept the sand in position.

Impermanence, including the maker

The mandala practice isn't terribly subtle. Everything put together gets taken apart. The person putting it together is temporary too. You don't need a special philosophy to spot this. It dawns on you once you notice how many projects and habits have come and gone without the sky falling in. The site made the point at least as clearly as any poem on it. A few thousand tracks exist because someone spent time on them. If that someone decides the time would be better spent elsewhere, the tracks don't suddenly acquire a moral right to carry on.

I'm not passing this off as a profound discovery. Plenty of people reach the same conclusion about their hobbies without bringing Tibet into it. The only difference here is that the hobby produced a public website, so stopping has a visible consequence. Not a large one.

Time and what it is for

There are pensions. They're not large, but they're enough for the life we actually want. They were earned to be spent on ordinary days, not kept back for possible future projects that might or might not seem worthwhile. There are only so many of those days. That's not a dramatic pronouncement, just the arithmetic that applies to everyone past a certain age.

My amazing wife and I met in 2002, and we've now been married for twenty years. We mean to be together until death do us part. Her company is very much preferable to that of long-dead poets, however good their verses. They're not going anywhere, which is one of the few practical advantages of having been dead for some time. Their books will be there whenever anybody fancies reading them. Ordinary days in Seville are another matter. A particular day won't sit on a shelf waiting to be opened again. Spend it on server logs, or deciding whether a new setting is worth finishing, and it's gone. You can't then spend it wandering through a corner of the city we haven't yet properly looked at. Put those choices side by side and there doesn't seem much to debate. The poets can wait. Seville, with my wife beside me, rather cannot.

The life that already exists

Most days we do go out and look at something in Seville. Nothing elaborate is required. A familiar street can still offer a detail neither of us has noticed, a bar that does a decent montadito, or just the pleasure of not having to be anywhere else or do anything else. The life is already full enough. It doesn't need extra structure imposed on it.

The site doesn't ask for much: a monthly payment, the odd security update, the knowledge that if something breaks, someone will eventually have to look at it. None of that is much of a burden on its own. Taken together, though, it's a small, persistent claim on my attention, now getting in the way of the days rather than adding to them. Leaving the collection exactly as it stands gets rid of that claim without making another job out of it.

What happens next

The site can stay up for a while or come down. I'm content with either. I've chosen to let it live on until the VPS contract expires and my hosting company pulls the plug. At that point, the site will simply cease to exist. The pleasure was in the making, and the making is finished. Anyone who found a poem or a track useful already has it. Anyone who didn't won't be losing something they were relying on. Other people will carry on reading the poets in other ways. None of that needs me to keep a server running.

This isn't an invitation to agree or disagree. The decision is simply that my remaining time is better spent on the life already under way than on keeping an arrangement of sand in place after it has served its purpose.