Permission Not To Finish: On The Joys of The Incomplete

I am currently reading Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman, another wonderful recommendation from the writing group I’ve joined at work. One of the things I like most about this book is that each chapter, designed to be read daily, takes only a few minutes of my time. At last, something I can achieve in my day! But one of the other things I like about this book is that it tells me aiming for the end of my to-do list might not actually be the key to happiness. I have always suspected this to be the case, even though I do love my lists. Or maybe I just think I love my lists? Maybe I’ve been trained into loving my lists? Maybe the list is just something tangible and predictable in an otherwise complex existence? I wonder what happens when I give myself permission not to finish the list?

On my list of tasks for every week – separated into work and life - I wait for the precious moment when I can see a tick. When I can see proof that I am achieving what I need to achieve, that I am ever closer to the hallowed goal of the finished list. By the time Thursday comes around, my Monday optimism has dwindled, and I feel a rising sense of panic that there are not more ticks on my list. In response I have developed the progress squiggle. If I work on something, nudge it along, do some thinking about it, I take a coloured pen and make a little squiggle. I recognise the doing, the progress, and not the end point.

My friend told me about a wonderful sentiment from Tim Minchin’s series Upright – that one never practices an instrument, one always plays it. I think of this when I see my daughter’s frustration when she can’t remember how to play a particular note on her flute, or when I look at my list of things to do and once again practicing the banjo did not make the cut. If these frustrations of inadequacy and incompleteness can be understood not as experience of practice, as we seek perfection of musical prowess, but as moments when we play, suddenly it all seems rather more positive. Listen to how I play the banjo!

This sentiment of play not practice melts away the distinction between what is finished and unfinished. In contrast with the bounded, obligatory, yet incomplete sentiment of ‘practice’, ‘play’ is full of agency, and more importantly full of joy. It is much more in the moment. I am not waiting for that time when I can play the banjo, when I have finished my many hours of laborious practice, but I am playing it every time I pick it up and pluck a string. I am not waiting to finish the pile of books next to my desk, I am in the active process of reading those books (or at least some of them). I am not looking at an unfinished to-do list, I am just doing.

What I like about the permission to play as opposed to the obligation to practice is the sense of a melting away of any distinction between what is finished and what is unfinished. These non-negotiable states of being are perhaps better described as a product of context and all the structures of inequalities and power imbalances that come with it. Where do we draw the line between the finished and unfinished? Is it always our line to draw? Much of what is most precious to me can never be finished – my vegetable garden, my marriage, my relationship with my children, my exploration of local places to walk.

In mediations for mortals Oliver Burkeman writes about the joyless life of the productivity debter, described as someone in a state of “frenetic activity … often in an effort to shore up a sense of ourselves as minimally acceptable member of society”. He contrasts this with a state in which our actions “can just be enjoyable expressions of the fact that that’s what we already are”. This seems like something I can take forward into my day, my week, my life.

Mind you, I have to finish the book first.

October 2025