I was around 11 years old when I finished writing my first full short story in a school in South London. And when I was done, I didn't feel fulfillment or satisfaction. I'd initiated a quiet confrontation with myself. Far from feeling I'd done a good job, the gentle echo of something completed, like footsteps fading on wet sand, had induced a sort of melancholy in me instead. "Eurgh", I thought. This is perhaps why I'd sometimes resisted completing things: completion reveals us to ourselves in ways we fear, in ways we might not be ready to face.
Finishing something, indeed finishing anything, is an existential act. It forces us to abandon the infinite continuum of possibilities for a finite reality. There's safety in the unending possibility of what could be. An unfinished work is alive with the vibrancy of endless outcomes, beautiful in its ambiguity. To finish something is to collapse all possibilities into one single, undeniable reality and to become vulnerable to judgment in doing so.
To add insult to injury, it turns out that finishing something requires effort. "I have to expend time and energy producing something which I might not be proud of, and which others might not like or, worse, simply ignore?". But yes! To complete is to assert our humanity. Completion is an act of defiance against a terrible paralysis, a sort of eternal preparation and endless rehearsal. Because what is the perfect story, or the perfect model, but an endlessly deferred confrontation with ourselves?
My younger self was mistaken in his essential feeling on all this. Far from possibilities collapsing to a point and fading to nothing like inconsequential fading footsteps, in conclusion we become simultaneously small and infinite. Small because we see clearly our limitations, fine, but infinite because our actions ripple endlessly into the world and onto ourselves. We can walk around our finished works, analyse them like sculptures in a gallery, and see from all sides what we have made, and what we have been made into in the making. And only in doing so could we hope to improve, to hone a sense of craftsmanship.
You need to finish something. I need to finish something. But what to spend my time on finishing? At first I didn't know. But in taking some time to understand the people around me and their desires, I realised something important to me: I could work on something that acknowledges others, that reaches even a single person in their particular ache or wonder, that turns the solitude of my internal world into solidarity, my inward spirals into outward connection. Whilst wants can be fleeting and creating something which aligns with them can feel like a fool's errand, I chose to explore that space within my mind that estimates the desires of others and focussed on making something people want.
In the end, to finish is inevitably to begin again. Completing one task creates the momentum to start another, an infinite regress of opportunities, each completion making the next one more approachable, easier still. This is the only way. No one ever did anything great by merely starting, and you don't need to achieve greatness to begin. You just need to finish something, anything, and then start again.