The Infinite Unfinished
Grieving all I'll never do
There are an infinite number of things I haven’t done, and an infinite number of things I’m never going to do.
Saying that - knowing that - embodying that - makes me feel things.
I’ve learned, through painful experience, that when I feel things I should hold space for those feelings. I should say to them,
“Hello, Feelings. It’s okay that you’re here, and that I have you, even if you might be unpleasant to experience or if I’m not supposed to have you.”
So this is me, holding space for these feelings.
There are an infinite number of things I haven’t done, and an infinite number of things I’m never going to do.
And I hate that.
I want to try everything.
Call it curiosity or open-mindedness or whatever. There are so many experiences out there, and I want to experience them all. There are books I haven’t read and movies I haven’t seen; trails I haven’t walked and roads I haven’t traveled; feelings I haven’t felt and people I haven’t loved.
And I will never get to try the vast majority of them.
This galls me.
It pulls at my sense of injustice like a child tugging a string. Why can’t I experience everything? Why not? I want to! I want to! I want to!
But I cannot.
Each day has only so many minutes, each minute so many seconds.
My life, only so many days.
I am finite.
The space of all possible experiences is not.
Every human’s experience is unique, one-of-a-kind. There are billions of them, and no two are exactly the same.
And yet I will only ever have the one.
I will never know what it’s like to be another person, and they will never quite know what it is to be me.
Of course that makes me lonely.
How could it not?
There are something on the order of one hundred and fifty million books in the world.
If only one percent were worth reading, that would still leave one point five million books.
If I read a new book a week for the rest of my life, I might only manage to read twenty-five hundred of them.
Twenty-five hundred of one point five million. That’s zero point one seven percent.
Movies. Television shows. Games.
The content is endless.
My time is not.
Quod erat demonstrandum: I will miss far more than I will experience.
There are foods I’ll never eat and drinks I’ll never taste. Places I’ll never go - not just in the cosmos but so very many places on this earth as well. Times I’ll never live in.
There are sunsets I’ll never see, vistas I’ll never visit, horizons I’ll never head towards.
Never having had them, never having had the chance to have them, feels like losing them.
And losing them feels like grief.
Is it wrong, to mourn for everything you’re never going to have?
All the paths not taken call to me.
I can only take one of you, I sob.
But are we all not unique and irreplaceable, they ask.
You are, I reply. But I still have to choose.
Choosing one thing means not choosing an infinite number of others.
Question: How can I refuse infinity over and over again?
Answer: Because one can’t live in the infinity of could. Life happens in the hobbled conceit of does. History is fettered by having to have actually happened, and the future is fettered by having to have been the present.
How does one mourn, not for what they’ve lost, but for what they’ve never known they could have?
How do you cry for a missing possibility?
How do I grieve the loss of infinity?
Worse still, grief itself has an opportunity cost.
I can’t exactly go out and get new experiences while I’m grieving, can I?
And yet leaving emotions unfelt and grief unprocessed is not an answer. It is a recipe for breakdown and depression and losing out on yet more life that could have been lived.
There is a line to be walked, between emotion and optimization, between fear and grief, between hope and pain. On this line the grief is felt, but so too life is lived.
Can I find that line? And if so, can I walk it?
We can only ever chart a single course through reality. We only get a single world-line, one four-dimensional worm that tracks our history through time and space.
I envy Groundhog Day’s Phil Connors his time loop. To be able to inhabit every corner, every nook and cranny and moment of even a single day, to so utterly know even a single town - surely that is the apex of experience.
And yet my alarm never wakes me to the same day twice, and so I open my eyes each morning knowing that the day before is lost to me forever.
Nothing in this universe - nothing - is infinite.
Even if I didn’t age, and the sun didn’t burn up all its fuel in nuclear fusion and go supernova, and life on earth continued on and on without limit or end, even then I wouldn’t be able to experience everything.
But I do age, and the sun will burn up eventually, and entropy always increases.
The past is forever closed to me. I’m excluded from all but the narrowest fraction of the present. And the future…the future is just the present, but tomorrow.
We all live in our tiny little corners of an endless reality, and those corners are all we ever get.
There are an infinite number of things I haven’t done, and an infinite number of things I’m never going to do.
And I hate that.
And I accept it. Some things we should not accept. Some limitations are meant to be broken. Some things beyond our grasp are worth reaching for.
But here and now, I accept that I will have to content myself with only experiencing the smallest, meanest, barest piece of all creation.
That piece, after all, is not zero - and there is an infinity in that.