The Gift of the Unfinished

There is something in us that cannot tolerate the open end. Something that reaches, almost involuntarily, for the resolution, the conclusion, the moment when the loose threads are gathered and the meaning becomes clear and the story arrives at the place where it can finally be understood as a whole rather than experienced as a collection of fragments that may or may not be moving in any coherent direction. We are meaning-making creatures by nature, and meaning, for us, tends to require completion. The incomplete thing sits in the interior with a particular quality of discomfort, a low hum of unresolved tension that the mind returns to again and again the way the tongue returns to the gap left by a missing tooth, pressing against the absence, measuring its dimensions, unable to simply accept the incompleteness as a condition rather than a problem to be solved.