unfinishing, v.

This article was originally published in The Crack magazine in June 2023.

There’s an enormous history of things that never got finished. Jane Austen left behind unfinished novels, Michelangelo had multiple unfinished sculptures and paintings, and Geoffrey Chaucer originally intended the Canterbury Tales to be much longer than the (already substantial) text that we read today. And those of us who aren’t famous or renowned are just as good at leaving our exploits incomplete. There must be many a shed, bottom drawer, attic, and ancient memory stick in which scrapped, abandoned, half-cooked, forgotten, and lost projects lurk.

“if a project goes off track, stops being enjoyable, is no longer needed, or morphs into something else, then stopping or diverting to a different path can be good choices. The route may be more scenic. ”

There’s an ingrained tendency to equate not finishing with failure. Living in a society focussed on goal setting and measuring achievement, it’s easy to feel inadequate if you dream of playing at the Royal Albert Hall, but you only get round to writing half a track of your breakthrough album. There’s an assumption that if you don’t finish something it’s because you’re lacking in determination. So it’s not surprising that we feel sensitive to missed opportunities (‘if only I’d spent less time watching TV, I could be a famous artist by now’).

It’s true that there’s something deeply frustrating about, say, a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle with the final piece missing. And if you set out with the aim of climbing a mountain or of running a marathon and you only get halfway up or halfway round, then in one sense you’ve failed in your endeavour.

But there are questions to answer about when and where not finishing started being frowned upon. Feeling unsatisfied when something remains incomplete may not be a psychologically inherent reaction. It could instead be an emotional response that’s shaped by culture – by all those societal assumptions about achieving goals in order to be ‘successful’. There may even be cultures today or in the past that celebrate ongoing or even abandoned exploits.

When asked to reflect on things they haven’t finished, people tend to conclude that there’s an enormous amount of value in those projects. Having the endurance to make it halfway round a marathon is after all an achievement in itself – as is getting through the months of training it takes. And sometimes the view from halfway up a mountain is better than at a cloud-covered peak. As mountaineer Rebecca Coles says, ‘you gain so much from that journey that finishing it could just be one step further, but you’ve taken 100,000 steps to get there’. Reaching the summit is just about ‘sitting down at a dinner party and saying whether you got to the top or not’.

In some cases incomplete things are so highly prized they’ve been enjoyed, pored over, and reimagined for generations. Dr Steve Kershaw, an expert on classics, reminds us that much of the evidence from ancient Greece and Rome has only partially survived. (One of Plato’s dialogues actually finishes mid-sentence, not because the rest is lost but because Plato for unknown reasons decided to abandon it). So classicists have to appreciate whatever incomplete words and artefacts have managed to make it through the centuries. Those who study and enjoy the literature and history of this period live in worlds of uncertainty, potential, and possibility.

At one point in Middlemarch George Eliot writes that, ‘It always remains true that if we had been greater, circumstance would have been less strong against us’. Taken out of context, this sentiment can provide a useful reminder that how we respond to tricky circumstances gives us some power over them. (And could come in handy if you really do want to finish something).

But that’s not the whole picture. Sometimes it isn’t the case that great things will follow if you just try hard enough. Consciously abandoning a work in progress or just letting something tail off doesn’t have to be a failure. There’s almost always something worthwhile in whatever has been created and in the process of getting there. And if a project goes off track, stops being enjoyable, is no longer needed, or morphs into something else, then stopping or diverting to a different path can be good choices. The route may be more scenic.