The Law of Eternal Fulfillment

Tonight, I'm grateful for incompleteness. Incompleteness in ourselves and in our lives.

Usually, I search for an equilibrium of finality and utility in what I do and feel unsatisfied with its opposite. It is a glorious feeling to finish a task and place a neat little check mark next to it. It presumes mastery of something that never stood a chance.

But most of everything around all of us is incomplete. And it's not a bad thing - as long as life and development are consistent.

As much as I love the finality of a project, a book, or a tv show, those are more the exceptions, not the rule. A closed chapter is exactly that - an agreement with the past. I prefer the infinite, the feeling of borderless space. The process and not the result.

To add more clarity, I saw the movie Proof tonight. Without revealing too much since I recommend you see it for yourself, Paltrow plays a daughter who gave up her budding career as a mathematician to care for her father, a brilliant mathematician masking his ebbing sanity. Think Good Will Hunting meets A Brilliant Mind.

One of the props in the movie is a notebook of questionable authorship that would revolutionize academic mathematics. But more than that, the notebook is a symbol of stability, trust, and the eternal quest to show that we have a sane and rational contribution to the world, even if nobody else understands it. And in that search for self-fulfillment, the gateway through ignorance is, hopefully, a brief journey and not a resting point.

Jumping stones but keeping the same theme, I read a random blog the other day. The one entry I read was about Michael Jordan. The author claimed to know everything and anything about his career. A little bold and silly, I thought. Anyway, he told the story where Jordan dunked on John Stockton only to be heckled by a fan for picking on somebody smaller than himself. So, the next time down the court, Jordan dunked on somebody much taller and heavier. Except in recounting the story, the scholar of All Things Jordan misidentified the unfortunate and slow-footed player. So much for knowing everything and anything.

When I lived in Portugal, I started to keep lists in order to add organization to my life. I kept a daily list of "Coisas Fazer" and "Coisas Limbrar", literally translated into "Things To Do" and "Things To Remember". Anything, even the seemingly inane and insignificant, would make the list. But the attempt was to commit memories, feelings, and other experiences into a tidy record that could be encased in their entirety.

And I think I'm slowly understanding my instatiable lust for hoarding books. Jim Morrison once said that the most terribly embarrassing phrase in the English language is "I don't know". I tend to agree. But I think the embarrassment rests in incuriosity and indifference to what happens around us. The contentness of spectating but not understanding.

So, I try to store as much knowledge as my bookshelves will hold. And Gekko, in the context of literary gluttony, was correct - greed is good.

And, thank goodness, my bookshelves will always be incomplete - despite the stacks and stacks that must be shelved horizontally.

And my lists of Coisas Fazer and Coisas Limbrar will always be lacking absolution.