On Learning to Leave Some Things Unfinished

There is a bookshelf in my hallway that has been missing its fourth shelf for eleven months. I know exactly where the missing piece is — in the garage, cut to size, sanded, waiting for a coat of varnish I have not applied. Every time I walk past it I feel a small, specific irritation, like a word on the tip of my tongue.

For a long time I treated this as a character flaw. Undisciplined. Prone to losing interest. The kind of person who starts things and doesn't finish them, which is supposed to be one of the worse things a person can be, at least according to the productivity books I've half-finished reading.

What the shelf actually needed

But the truth, when I actually sat with it, was less dramatic. The shelf doesn't need to be finished. It needs one more coat of varnish and forty minutes I have simply not prioritized, because the books fit fine on three shelves and the fourth was always ambition, not necessity.

I started applying this same question to other unfinished things — the language app I opened four times this year, the second half of a course I paid for, a short story that's been at 1,800 words since February. Does this actually need finishing, or did I just decide, at some point, that finishing was the only acceptable outcome?

Some things did need finishing, and naming that clearly was useful — it turned vague guilt into an actual decision, which is a much lighter thing to carry. But more of them, once I looked closely, were just artifacts of a version of me who wanted something for a season and then, reasonably, wanted something else.

An unfinished thing is not automatically a failure. Sometimes it's just a decision you haven't formally made yet.

I still haven't varnished the shelf. But I've stopped feeling irritated when I walk past it, which is its own kind of finishing — not of the object, but of the argument I was having with myself about what the object meant.