Being Unfinished is a Sign of Life

A companion piece to Tuesday’s Aliveness is Choosing to Live in the "Caterpillar Soup"

I keep coming back to this moment from Tuesday's train platform story.

The guy in the Radiohead hoodie is sketching spirals in his notebook, and I'm standing there calculating how this missed train is going to cascade through my entire day. My jaw is locked, my shoulders are creeping toward my ears, and I'm treating this delay like a personal attack from the universe.

And he looks up and says: "Most people hate waiting. But I kind of love it."

He loves it.

Not “tolerates” it. Not makes the best of it. Loves it.

The Specific Discomfort of Existing Unfinished

I've been thinking about that phrase all week and realizing how foreign it feels in my own relationship to uncertainty.

To being mid-process.

To existing in spaces where I can't give people clean answers about what I'm doing or where I'm headed.

Last month, someone asked me at a work event what my "five-year plan" was, now that I was “healed” from my injury 🙃 and past my divorce.

I actually felt my face get hot.

Not because I don't think about the future, but because the question assumes I should have crystallized into something definable by now. Like being in process is a temporary inconvenience rather than... just how life works.

I said… “I don't know yet.” And I had a moment where I felt like a complete failure. My gut felt like it dropped out of the bottom of my body.

We've created a culture where "I don't know yet" feels like an admission of failure instead of an honest response to complexity.

When Everything Feels Dead

But here's the thing about rushing toward those clean answers: we can actually oversolve the problem of uncertainty. We can plan and optimize and nail things down so thoroughly that we end up with something worse than not knowing what comes next.

We end up with a life that feels dead.

The train platform guy said something that's been haunting me: "Everything feels dead when it's too planned out."

I know that feeling.

How I rehearse difficult conversations in my car, practicing different versions of the same truth until none of them sound real anymore. How I'll sometimes plan a weekend so thoroughly that by Sunday, I feel like I've lived someone else's life.

There's this particular kind of suffocation that happens when you've organized all the mystery out of your days. When you've given yourself clean answers to every question but lost the aliveness that lives in not knowing.

That restlessness you've been trying to cure by figuring everything out? It's not a problem to solve. It's about what happens when life becomes too small, too controlled, and too far removed from the beautiful uncertainty where real growth occurs.

Which brings me back to what the train platform guy understood: maybe the goal isn't to get out of the soup. Maybe it's to learn how to float.

The Soup You're Already Swimming In

He called it the "soup phase," that formless space where you're no longer who you were but not yet who you're becoming. Where everything feels liquid and undefined.

And you're probably in some version of soup right now. Some area where you haven't crystallized yet, some part of yourself that's still soft and taking shape.

Maybe it's what you want to do with your work. Maybe it's how you want to love or be loved. Maybe it's smaller than that, like what you actually enjoy doing on weekends. Or bigger, like whether you want kids, or what friendship looks like now that you've lived a little longer.

And instead of inhabiting that space, maybe you're doing what I sometimes do—apologizing for it. Explaining it away. Treating your own becoming like a project that's running behind schedule.

But transformation doesn't operate on a timeline. It operates on its own strange clock, dissolving what needs to dissolve and forming what wants to form, usually when you're not looking.

Ten Minutes to Stop Rushing Your Own Blooming

Today's meditation isn't about finding answers. It's about giving yourself permission to exist in whatever soup you're already in without trying to climb out or speed up the cooking process.

Ten minutes to practice the radical act of loving the part of you that's still becoming. To remember that being unfinished isn't a character flaw.

It's a sign you're still alive enough to grow.

If you've been craving permission to stay soft a little longer, to trust your own timeline instead of everyone else's expectations, come sit with this. The meditation is waiting below for paid subscribers, along with some gentle practices for learning to love your own soup phase.

Remember, annual subscriptions are 30% off throughout June. Yay!