We've got unfinished business

Closure.

When we can't have what we truly want, we like to tell ourselves that closure is what we need. The cynic in me wants to scoff at this and say, "Of course you don't need closure, we need food and water and air". It's been proven though, that to be successful in life, one needs more than just the basic. People need to be loved and nurtured. But it isn't all about success (however one may measure such a thing). Our need for closure is almost instinctive, intuitive.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson puts it:

"The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin."

The need for closure then, runs deeper than what can be tuition. I don't think it's something that can very well be learned. Our need for closure the nagging feeling we get when TV shows leave you with just a cliffhanger. It's the way we believe ghosts are souls with unfinished business. It's the way you hurry when you have to put your book down in the middle of a good part and go pee--okay, maybe that's just me.

We hate open endings because they leave us with doubt and insecurity. The feeling of insecurity and helplessness we feel when faced with an open ending scorns our vanity like few other things can. We have to feel that we can control the events in our life because we know the end exists, surer than anything, so we have to make it count. If we can't control it, how could we ever make sure it really does count?

We don't.

I, myself, am not immune to the uneasy feeling of not seeing something through. I can, however, admire the beauty of an endless perhaps. While death is finite and absolute, an open ending leaves us with Infinity--the nostalgic world of what could have happened.

I'm not afraid of dying. As Walt Whitman very well said, "to the well organized mind, death is but the next great adventure". I'm scared of the definite and the absolutely unchangeable-- of the autopsy that says exactly how it happened where my parts would sum up to who I was.

One hears those stories of the lonely person who got lost in the backwoods only to be found dead by some kids weeks later. Me? I want to get lost forever so that whosoever may care will never run out of things to think. "Perhaps she sprouted wings and flew to a shore where she became a crab. Perhaps she was fished out by an old man who made a meal of her. Perhaps she died in a completely unremarkable way. Perhaps… "

To Albert Camus, Sisyphus, whose punishment it was to push a rock up a hill for all eternity, had two choices: let the rock fall on him so he would die or embrace the punishment, defying the Gods by showing himself happy in the face if his fate. I propose that we should do the same when it comes to the loose ends in our lives (not that these are punishment). When faced with something we simply cannot see through, we should smile.

-Veronica