We All Finish Unfinished

Maybe I Am Meant to Be Unfinished

When I was young, I thought life was a question that needed a single answer.

At different points, I wanted to be a poet, a filmmaker, a librarian, a café owner, a therapist, an architect, a musician playing on sidewalks. I imagined selling books in a quiet little town, growing my own vegetables, healing people, wearing suits in glass buildings, dancing on rooftops in cities that never slept. Sometimes I even wanted to disappear.

Looking back, these were not confused dreams. They were different windows through which I wanted to experience life.

Perhaps that is what growing older teaches us. Our goals do not remain still because we do not remain still. What seemed desperately important at twenty may feel strangely irrelevant at forty. What we once called success may later seem like an elaborate distraction. A failure that broke us at one age may become the very experience that gave us wisdom at another.

Life keeps editing us.

Marriage changes the grammar of our choices. Responsibilities rearrange our priorities. Children introduce an entirely new vocabulary of love and sacrifice. A job can make us discover an ambition we never knew existed, or bury an old dream beneath deadlines and responsibilities. Success can satisfy us, or leave us wondering why we wanted it so badly. Failure can close one door while quietly revealing a corridor we had never noticed.

Loss changes us most profoundly. It strips away some illusions and makes other things suddenly precious. We begin to understand that time is not an endless road but a finite landscape, and that some destinations matter less than the people with whom we travelled.

And then there is travel.

Perhaps travel is one of life's greatest privileges because it allows us, even temporarily, to live other versions of ourselves.

In another city, I can become the man who wakes early and walks through unfamiliar streets with a camera. In a small town, I can imagine owning a bookshop. In Paris, perhaps I am a poet. In London, a flâneur. In a café somewhere, I can become a storyteller. On a mountain road, I can be someone who needs nothing except the road ahead. By the sea, I can become contemplative. In a crowded city, adventurous.

Travel does not merely take us to different places. It introduces us to the people we might have been. 

Perhaps that is why I have never felt entirely comfortable with the idea of becoming just one thing. Maybe I am not supposed to. Maybe I am meant to remain unfinished.

Perhaps my life will ultimately be a collage of everything I ever wanted to be: fragments of dreams, abandoned ambitions, unexpected victories, beautiful failures, people I loved, places I discovered, books I read, films I watched, roads I travelled, meals I shared, songs that stayed with me, and moments that changed the direction of my life.

No life is a complete story.

There is no final version of ourselves waiting at the end, perfectly assembled and labelled.

We are always becoming. Always adding another piece to the collage. Always leaving something behind and carrying something forward.

Perhaps life was never about finding the one thing I was meant to be. Perhaps it is about remaining curious enough to keep searching. A work in progress. A story still being written. A journey without a final draft. 

...Because in the end none of us have a very long time on this earth. Life is fleeting. Live as many of the versions you had wanted to be. And try your best to make your life spectacular!