What’s Really There

This is something I felt while listening to music today. I’m drawn, for some reason, to things that exist in an imperfect state. Perfect things are wonderful, of course, but sometimes it’s the ones still in progress, the unfinished ones, that move me.

I can’t quite explain why, but one guess is that I feel their existence more vividly. Perfect things seem to sit somewhere far off, as if I’m looking at them as something unrelated to me.
For instance, a slightly wavering voice moves me more than a perfectly even one. A person speaking in their own halting words moves me more than a flawless speech. And here a question comes up: what exactly makes something “finished,” or “perfect,” and what makes it “unfinished,” or “incomplete”? The line is actually very blurry.

For the speaker, the standard for perfection is probably to not stray far from the script, and to speak without stumbling. But for the listener, the standard must be different. Even if the speaker feels they spoke flawlessly, if nothing moved the listener, they might feel they wasted their time listening.

The listener may be judging the value of the speech not only by technical polish, but by how earnestly the person is reaching for their words in that moment, and whether there’s real value in what’s being said.

Taking the thought further: if someone speaks earnestly, with something worth hearing, and the technical polish is high as well, then surely the appeal only grows. There’s no way something would feel unrelated to me simply because it’s perfect. So perhaps the mistake is judging things by sorting them into finished and unfinished at all.

The wavering voice I heard today, the halting words in that speech—it wasn’t because they were unfinished that they moved me. It was because something that ought to be there was there. Something trying, in earnest, to be conveyed. That’s all it was.

Even so, it’s true that unfinished things, things still in progress, move me. Whether that’s my own personal taste, or something inherent to being human, I don’t know yet. But the fact that I’m drawn to them—that, at least, is certainly there.