The Complete Incomplete

• What an irony that people relate to each other around their needs. They love in others whatever they find lacks in them. They build relationships to complete their incompleteness. What if a person realises his / her own completeness and does not look out for completeness outside of ones own self. How could you, in your finiteness, possibly know that ?

• “Have you heard of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem?” In 1931 Gödel proved incompleteness for formal systems.

• His first incompleteness theorem states that for any consistent formal system adequate for number theory, there exists at least one true statement that is not provable or decidable within the system.

• His second incompleteness theorem, a corollary to the first, states that no such system can serve as its own metalanguage, i.e., it cannot be employed to show its own consistency.

• Very roughly it says: You cannot measure the size of your bungalow while staying yourself in the kitchen.

• I like it as a metaphor for being yourself: the inability to define a system that is both consistent and complete sort of captures the situation of a human being asking "who am I?"

• By that I mean "you cannot form a complete and accurate concept of yourself". No matter how hard you try to come up with a precise and clear and complete model of your own being, it slips through your hands. The problem is that human being is not fundamentally conceptual: you're not an idea, you're more like the space in which the ideas live.

• But even that is another idea, yes? See what I mean? I just tried to define 'being', and fell short. Dang. That's just one of many possible definitions -- I could go on and on with variations, I've been at this for many years. They all fail in some way, although many are potentially useful.

• I call this "the dimension gap": being has more dimensions than knowing (concepts). I can *be* myself, but I cannot fully *know* myself. This continues to fascinate me.

Incomplete is Not a Taboo; It’s Something Worth Giving a Thought

• In the book of Taoism- the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu threw light into ‘nothingness’ and how the ‘empty space’ and ‘mass’ complete each other. Analogically, there is no complete without incomplete and no incomplete without complete. They both co-exist; they amplify each other- subtly and silently.

• Just like there is beauty because there is ugliness, the same way- there is incompleteness because next to it lies completeness.

• Incompleteness is sometimes better than the completed version, because at the end of the day, no one is looking for absolute perfection, but rather a reason to find perfection…

• The human brain is designed in such a way that it strives to find perfection, beauty, and completeness everywhere. In this quest, people oftentimes forget to think sane and contemplate the beauty of ‘incomplete’ things. Seldom do they understand that those so-called ‘incomplete things’ that are ‘complete’ in their own way.

What is Incomplete?

• Before diving into the mainstream of the, it is essential to figure out what ‘incomplete’ means. Literally speaking, it means something that isn’t done yet, or something unfinished. In order to finish a thing, it needs to have a beginning and an end. All the incomplete things lie between them. For example incomplete homework, unfinished poetry, or incomplete relationships.

The beauty beneath the complete incomplete

• Looking around, one can even ignore, but there are myriad incomplete things. Not less than often, there is underlying beauty resting with it which is lurking and waiting for people’s attention.

The Incomplete Wall

• A four-walled room is kinda incomplete. One of the four walls is not closed and has a door, the other walls may have windows or even a ventilator. Had it been a complete four-walled structure, it would have been closed COMPLETELY. But the walls are incomplete, and this is how someone can enter inside it. Think about it delicately. Completeness would have just given four closed walls and no one can enter inside it, not even light.

The Incomplete Human

• ‘No one is perfect’ is a cliché premise resting at the tip of the tongue of every millennial and Gen z. It states that all humans are imperfect in their own way and this is how they are unique. This is how the world works. No one would look for happiness or financial security if everyone was ‘perfect’ or ‘complete’. The bad thing is- people consider them as ‘not good enough’ but the good thing is- there is no need to be good enough. And when people confront it rather than running from it- they find lifelong friendships and even love!

The Incomplete Books

• The funny thing is that when people read books, they read it with a concentration in order to find what happens in the end. There are many good incidents and things to learn in between but nevertheless, the ending would be better than that-they think. However, the ending seems agitating- it is incomplete!

• “How am I supposed to know what happened in the end? Was it a happy ending or a disastrous demolition?”

• What happens next? They Google it and end up reading the author’s spouse’s love story. Jokes apart.

• The best thing about incomplete book endings is the way every single reader of the book is so engrossed in imagining ‘what the ending would be like’ and there is a different ending inside the mind of every reader. Myriad imaginations or myriad people.

• Incomplete book endings also teach that “endings don’t matter if you draw you conclusions little by little in the betweens”

Incompleteness Of Man

• Look at an animal – a cat, a cockroach, a fish in the ocean. All have everything they need. All are already everything they need to be. Animals are born complete.

• There is nothing to be added to a fish or a cockroach from the moment it is born until it passes away – only size and mass. The day the cockroach dies it is the same cockroach it was when it was born – only bigger and fatter and more disgustingly brown.

• But man, the human animal, belongs to a category of his own. He is born with a body not yet fully formed and he is helpless and completely dependent on others for years. But his physical incompleteness is just the beginning. Even after he grows up  – two decades of acculturation and education later – he still feels incomplete. And he struggles for completeness – be it finding meaning, harmony, or fulfillment – for the rest of his life. That’s part of the definition of a human life: it is always incomplete.

• An animal, being born complete and remaining so throughout its life, is always ready to die. Thus, there is nothing cruel in this Nature of the devouring and the devoured. Everything killed and consumed is already complete and thus, in the truest sense, ready to die. A human, on the other hand, being always incomplete, is never ready to die. It is this underlying feeling of incompleteness, still present even in the final moments of dying, that lies at the very heart of the constant fear of dying. Not even a person in extreme old age lying on his deathbed feels ready to leave this world: the about-to-die feels deprived of the opportunity to complete his being before departing. This is also one of the main reasons that we created systems of philosophy and religion: to explain, or even explain away, death. The eternal life of Christians, the jannah of Muslims, the belief in reincarnation of Hindus and Buddhists, are all (in part) attempts to come to terms with the fact that death may strike at any moment before we experience the fullness of life. Religions, at least in their outer forms, transform the incompleteness of man at the point of death into a promise for completeness in the afterlife.

• We arrive into this world incomplete, go about our lives searching half-blindly for ways to complete ourselves, and in the end, after failing in our struggle, we depart almost as incomplete as we appeared. What is the purpose then of this lifelong “struggle for completeness” when our failure is preordained?

• The answer to this is to be found in the word struggle – not in completeness itself which is unattainable. Our struggle for completeness moves and governs our growth, so that we flower into something different from what we originally were. Unlike the cockroach, the old man on his deathbed is not the same person who entered into the world. He is another being. Our sense of incompleteness drives our movement towards learning, growth, wisdom. The life cycle of the butterfly symbolizing the stages of life in so many cultures is pertinent: We are all born as caterpillars, crawling and searching blindly for food. Then one day, after we become “big and fat” (with knowledge and experience), we start eating our own bodies and turn into a chrysalis – as we grow, we unwittingly become transformed. Finally we acquire wings, leave the cocoon and fly – departing from this world, not as caterpillars, but as butterflies.

• Our incompleteness is both our curse and our blessing. We are cursed to ceaselessly struggle for completeness. But we are also blessed with the potentiality, and most often with the final actuality, of gaining wings to fly. Unlike the rest of the animal kingdom, we have the ability to become a different organism, a different being from the one we were at birth – even if we still remain incomplete.

We are the seekers, the warriors of the unattainable!

• Our struggle for completeness never ends. But it is through this struggle and because of it that we are, or rather become, humans. For our species is not born, it is made. Or rather it is constantly in the process of being made. Man is changed and transformed throughout his life. Therefore, he can never be defined – he is ceaselessly re-defined through living itself. Our incompleteness becomes our only unalterable feature. We are the permanently incomplete species.

• Restless.

• Always moving. And searching. And struggling to fly.

• The creative life of Leonardo da Vinci is a metaphor for explaining the synergy between the completeness of incompleteness and the incompleteness of completeness of the dynamic nature of reality . While Leonardo began many projects in his life, he completed few of them. One of ways to look at these partly finished works is to say that while observers believed them incomplete from the Leonardo 's perspective they were finished . 

• The completeness of incompleteness is simultaneously the incompleteness of completeness.

• The way UP and the way DOWN are the same. Opposites can only exist if they exist together. Concavity only exists because convexity exists, and vice versa.

• In attempting to make the invisible world visible or the universal particular, something is lost. As a concrete thing, the work of art will always be a particular, incomplete . In the same way, there are no perfect circles in the world, there are no perfect works of art. Works of art remain incomplete . Creativity is that movement toward the next creation , toward completion. Incompleteness is just as much a part of completeness as completeness is part of incompleteness. Incompleteness and completeness give rise to life activity : "From the completeness of incompleteness to the incompleteness of completeness-the synergy between these two perspectives is the source of life's infinite creativity, the dynamism of existence.?' The synergy of completeness-incompleteness is evident in thinking. Thinking is simultaneously a movement toward order and toward chaos, toward clarity and ambiguity . Clarity points toward completeness; ambiguity points toward incompleteness: Thinking is not simply the movement from ambiguity to clarity, but from clarity to ambiguity. In other words , it is a double movement. Clarification is one element of thinking , but equally important is the movement back to ambiguity, toward chaos . Thinking is a tension between pulling together and pushing apart.

• The work of art and the nature of thinking dramatize the dynamic
  movement of all things . Existence is fluidity, not solid . Yet language often
  obscures fluidity from view : "The reifying nature of language destroys the
  dynamic synergy of completeness and incompleteness and creates the illusion that a temporary state of stability is eternal.:"

• Therefore the intelligent man accepts what is as what is. In seeking
  to grasp what is, he does not devote himself to the making of distinctions
  which are then mistaken to be separate existences.