Perfectly Unfinished

What if the most vibrant spaces are the ones we leave room to discover?

I've been having a two-week-long staring contest with the blank wall in my living room. So far, the wall is winning, and honestly?

It's starting to look a little smug about it.

🙄

The expanse has remained stubbornly empty since I moved in, not for lack of options or suggestions. My phone practically hyperventilates with daily notifications of algorithmically selected wall art; friends text links to prints they're "absolutely certain" would transform the space, and my browser history reveals late-night excavations into the archaeological depths of gallery wall arrangements that would make Indiana Jones look lazy.

This blank wall—this canvas of possibility—has become an unexpected sanctuary in a home that's otherwise settled into definition.

It wasn't until yesterday morning, leaning against my kitchen counter—coffee warming my palms, morning light painting fractured patterns across the floor—that I recognized why I've been reluctant to "complete" this space.

I've been here before. Standing in doorways. Inhabiting the in-between. Finding unexpected wisdom in spaces that refuse simple definition.

Turns out my blank wall isn't just being difficult—it's being enlightened. And, we could all take notes.

The Canvas That Breathes

Let's get something straight: my reluctance to fill this wall isn't laziness or indecision. 😉

It's an intuitive resistance to premature closure.

Our culture has a peculiar relationship with blank spaces. We're taught to see emptiness as an accusation, unfinished rooms as problems begging for solution, bare walls as failures of imagination or follow-through.

Just scroll through any home décor account—you'll find no breathing room, blank expanses, or corners waiting for a purpose to find them. Every surface styled, every wall adorned, every square inch assigned a function and aesthetic value. It's giving "control issues dressed up as good taste," and I say that with both love and self-recognition.

These curated spaces have a certain shellacked quality—smooth, perfect, and about as permeable as my great-aunt's plastic-covered sofa.

They present themselves as aspirational endpoints rather than living processes. They whisper seductively: This is what completion looks like. This is what you should want.

(Spoiler alert: It's giving infomercial promises, not actual fulfillment.)

But what happens when we actually achieve these perfectly "finished" rooms?

I remember the frantic energy of my last move and how possessed I was by the need to have everything unpacked, arranged, and "completed" within the first week. Pictures were hung, books were alphabetized, and surfaces were styled with casual-looking objects that took forty-five minutes to arrange in that "I just tossed these here" way that absolutely no one has ever just tossed anything.

I succeeded, in a way. My space looked remarkably like the inspiration photos I had saved on my phone, but something curious happened in the months that followed.

That perfectly arranged home calcified.

(Also, it really didn’t stay that way once I started living)

What had been created as a living space fossilized into a museum of intentions. The artfully arranged bookshelf never evolved because I had mentally marked it as "complete." The gallery wall, with its precise constellation of frames, faded into invisibility—background noise rather than something that continued to spark joy or interest.

In my rush to complete, I closed the door on possibility.

The blank wall in my current living room offers something different—not emptiness, but potential.

Not absence, but spaciousness.

A living membrane between what is and what might be. It's like that friend who somehow makes everyone feel more interesting just by truly listening instead of waiting for their turn to talk.

When Unfinished Spaces Come Alive

Last Tuesday, as morning light hit my blank wall at an angle I'd never noticed before, I watched dust particles dancing in the beam like tiny universes. A private light show I would have missed entirely if I had hurried to hang the art there.

It was giving cosmic disco, and I was fully here for it.

In its very blankness, this wall has become the most responsive space in my home—shapeshifting with the hour and the need. Its emptiness isn't a void waiting to be filled but a pause in the visual conversation, a rest note in the composition that gives meaning to everything around it.

It made me think about how we experience music. The spaces between notes are not empty—they're rich with anticipation, creating rhythm and allowing each note to be heard. Without these pauses, even the most beautiful melody becomes noise. It's like the difference between someone who talks non-stop at you versus someone who knows the divine art of conversational breathing room.

Perhaps our spaces, like our hearts, need unfilled corners where possibility can gather and wait for the right moment to reveal itself.

The Alchemy of Incompleteness

I've been thinking about this relationship between completion and possibility ever since I wrote about liminal spaces earlier this month—those thresholds between one state and another where transformation happens. Standing in doorways taught me that "when you're not fully defined, you're also not fully limited."

The same holds true for our living spaces. And if there's one thing I've learned about limitations, it's that they're often just creativity that hasn't had its coffee yet.

There's a fascinating psychology experiment where researchers gave one group of children complete, perfect toys and another group toys with some parts missing. The children with the incomplete toys engaged in longer, more imaginative play. The gaps became invitations to creativity rather than failures of design.

This is the alchemy of incompleteness—its very unfinishedness creates space for something that perfect completion cannot: participation. It's the difference between being handed a script versus being invited to co-create the story.

That corner without a predetermined purpose? It becomes a meditation spot on Tuesday mornings when the light is soft, a plant propagation station on Friday evenings, and an unexpected workspace when the kitchen table is overtaken by projects. Its identity shifts according to changing needs rather than remaining fixed by design intention. It's versatile, adaptable, and has better work-life boundaries than most of us.

That shelf with breathing room between carefully chosen objects? It offers space for seasonal treasures, borrowed books, and unexpected gifts that would have no place in a "finished" arrangement. It's the spatial equivalent of keeping room in your schedule for serendipity.

And my stubbornly empty wall? It's become a permission slip to remain in process. A reminder that my home, like my life, doesn't need to reach some artificial finish line to be valuable or beautiful.

As I wrote about thresholds and liminal spaces: "If liminality isn't a temporary condition but the very nature of existence, then I don't need to rush through it. I can settle into it, explore it, and even find beauty in it."

The same applies to our unfinished spaces. They aren't temporary problems awaiting resolution. They're breathing room for a life that refuses to be entirely predictable.

The Counterintuitive Freedom of Letting Go

There's something deeply counterintuitive about intentionally leaving spaces unfinished. It requires resisting powerful cultural currents that equate completion with success, blank space with failure.

It means answering the well-meaning question, "When are you going to put something there?" with the gentle subversion, "When the wall tells me what it wants to be."

(And yes, that answer does make me sound like I'm communing with drywall, but I stand by it. My wall and I have developed quite the relationship.)

It means recognizing that our homes exist to serve our lives, not the other way around—and that sometimes the most functional choice is to preserve possibility rather than foreclose it. It's like dating someone who encourages you to grow rather than someone who needs you to be exactly as you are forever.

Most radically, it means questioning whether "finished" is ever an appropriate goal for a living space.

This, if we're being honest, is kind of liberating. It's like realizing you don't actually need to respond to that passive-aggressive email or that you can just wear the same black outfit to every event, and people will think you're chic rather than lazy.

I think about my grandparents' home and how it evolved over decades. Nothing was ever "done" in the way interior designers use the term. Their space was a living document of continual becoming: a wall of family photos that grew with each generation, furniture that migrated to different rooms as needs changed, and gardens that evolved with their interests and abilities.

Their home was never finished because they weren't finished with living.

What if we approached our spaces with this same organic sensibility? Not as projects to complete but as ecosystems to tend? Not as statements to make but as conversations to continue?

The most finished-looking homes are often the least lived in, while the most vibrant homes maintain a perpetual state of becoming, complete in their very incompleteness. It's like the difference between a perfectly preserved museum and a constantly evolving garden: One you admire from a distance, while the other invites you to dig your hands in the dirt.

Homes That Breathe: The Living Architecture of Incompleteness

What would our spaces look like if we intentionally preserved room for evolution?

Maybe it's a wall left bare until the right piece emerges naturally—not because you hunted it down to fill a gap, but because it earned its place through meaning rather than function.

Perhaps it's a corner with a chair and nothing else, waiting for its purpose to emerge through seasons of use—a space defined by presence rather than pre-determination.

It could be shelves with deliberate gaps, curated not by design principles but by the natural accumulation of objects that prove their meaning through the test of daily life. Less "I bought this because it matches the color scheme" and more "This weird rock reminds me of that perfect day at the beach."

Practical incompleteness might look like:

• Resisting the urge to buy "filler" pieces just to complete a room. (Your wallet will thank you, and so will the planet.)

• Allowing spaces to evolve based on how you actually live, not how you imagine you should live. (Practically no one uses that formal dining room.)

• Seeing blank walls and empty corners as possibilities rather than problems. (They're not ghosting you; they're just waiting for the right moment.)

• Giving yourself permission to live with uncertainty instead of rushing toward false resolution. (I couldn’t think of something for the parentheses here, sorry.)

This approach doesn't mean abandoning intention or care for your space. Quite the opposite—it requires deeper attention to how you actually move through and use your home rather than how it performs for others.

It means creating spaces that respond to life rather than demanding that life conform to spaces. It's the difference between a friend who loves you as you are versus one who only approves when you're acting "appropriately." And we all know which friend is getting the late-night emergency call.

The Resonance of Empty Rooms

I've noticed something curious about how people react to different spaces. The rooms that people comment on most positively in my home aren't the ones with perfect styling or complete arrangements. They're the ones with a certain quality of aliveness…spaces that feel responsive, that invite participation, that suggest possibility.

These spaces have what musicians might call resonance, the quality that allows a note to vibrate, expand, and fill a room. In perfectly completed spaces, there's nowhere for energy to go, no room for resonance. In spaces with intentional incompleteness, life has room to reverberate.

I wonder if this reflects something deeper about human connection. We're often drawn not to those who present themselves as completely figured out but to those who maintain a certain openness, a willingness to evolve, and a space for new discovery.

Our homes, like our hearts, perhaps need unfilled corners where possibility can gather and wait for the right moment to reveal itself. (And yes, I liked that line so much I used it twice. Some wisdom bears repeating, especially when it sounds this good.)

The Wider Canvas

This philosophy of intentional incompleteness extends beyond our living rooms. It touches something essential about how we move through the world.

In our careers, creative lives, and relationships—everywhere we feel pressure to arrive at completion—there might be wisdom in preserving spaces of possibility and resisting the urge to declare things finished before they've had the chance to fully reveal themselves.

I still don't know what will eventually claim space on my living room wall. Or if anything will. And that's exactly the point.

The blank space isn't a failure of completion. It's an act of patience. A declaration of trust in the unfolding process. An acknowledgment that this home, like the person who lives in it, is still becoming.

As I wrote about thresholds and liminal spaces: "Don't rush. Don't look away. This unfinished, undefined moment has something to show you."

The same could be said for the unfinished spaces in our homes. They aren't waiting rooms for "real life" to begin. They're invitations to a deeper kind of presence—one that honors the perpetual unfolding that is life itself.

Because in the end, perhaps the most honest room in your home isn't the one you've perfected, but the one you've left room to discover. The one that's confident enough in its own existence that it doesn't need to prove anything to anyone.

If my blank wall could talk, I think it would just shrug and say, "I contain multitudes, darlin’. What's your hurry?"

What about you?

Where in your space might you benefit from embracing incompleteness?

What possibilities could open up if you left room for what you don't yet know?

About Alex

That's me on the other side of the camera, from the wall photo I started this article with. And hey, no judgment! I still haven’t fully moved in yet.

I’m equal parts old soul and curious wanderer, a farmer boy at heart, and a writer whenever I can corral my ADHD. Ultimately, I write for those who crave rest in a world that never pauses.

As a political psychologist, yoga therapist, and integrative coach—anchored by both research and lived experience—I delve into questions of identity, connection, and wholeness, which are the foundation of my Substack publication, Life as I See It.

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