Whether we like it or not we have to accept one perfect truth in this life; it comes, endures and ends incomplete. Of course, we don’t like this—life should be, after all, perfect.
I often write and am left feeling it’s incomplete. I have to accept my best. It’s too bad if I don’t. ‘Tough bikkies,’ my wife would say. It’s just a reality. Who really has the final word?
Our life works in the end will remain incomplete just as our completed weeks remain incomplete—the carried-over tasks, the meetings we missed, the time we lost, the thoughts that were interrupted and the places we didn’t see... the people we didn’t love.
This is not meant to depress us; it’s just a firm reality designed for us to accept before we then prioritise around this eternal—of-this-world—constraint.
We’re easily taken on whims of fancy in this life—that we control it. Our very instincts accord to our thoughts to this end and we’re even more confused as to ‘why the gap?’ We trust the wrong things frequently because we don’t question.
Perhaps inspired by Backstreet Boys’ classic song by the same title, we sit and scratch our heads wondering why ‘the life’ makes absolutely so little sense at all. And still it makes plenty of sense if we attend to its truth—in a way, respecting the nature of life and not kicking against the pricks.
We’re all in an altogether incomplete life and our test is what we do with that reality. What now will separate us from the next person in the way we will choose to live our lives?
Incomplete, always; yet happy and content with that lot—that’s what it means to approach old age with no unreconciled issues. Our task (if we should choose to accept it!) is to become “wealthy” in the wisdom of old age well before that time even dawns.
Accept, then celebrate, your incompleteness.
© 2010 S. J. Wickham.
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