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| Snowy Ambush, John Philip Falter (1959) |
I don't like abrupt and haphazard endings. By "ending," I mean the conclusion of anything artistic, literary or even geopolitically in current global perspectives. If real life rarely offers absolute resolutions, why do writers, philosophers, and artists force artificial resolutions on their works, which sometimes makes their works look dishonest? Why must they pick an arbitrary boundary or a point where they announce, “This thing is finished”? Isn't an open ending - most of the times - also an ending? It’s incomplete but still an ending, just like many things in life.
Oscar Wilde described the psychological wear and tear of realizing that his written work has hit its limit, saying: "I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon, I put it back again."
Paul Cezanne believed that a painting was not complete just because the canvas was fully painted. To him, a painting was truly finished when the spatial relationship between the color panes was in perfect unison. In his late works, he famously used to intentionally leave patches of canvas unpainted. According to him, merely completing the canvas by covering those empty spaces would disrupt the visual flow and balance of the piece.
Paul Cezanne believed that a painting was not complete just because the canvas was fully painted. To him, a painting was truly finished when the spatial relationship between the color panes was in perfect unison. In his late works, he famously used to intentionally leave patches of canvas unpainted. According to him, merely completing the canvas by covering those empty spaces would disrupt the visual flow and balance of the piece.
Despite working on the Mona Lisa for sixteen years and continuously tweaking it, Leonardo da Vinci couldn’t finish it until his death. Similarly, Karl Marx’s magnum opus Das Kapital was almost entirely unfinished at the time of his death, leaving Friedrich Engels to work on the final volumes based on fragmented notes left by Marx.
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| Jasmyn Arnold, I Just Wanna be Me (2023) |
When my daughter was four and a half, or maybe five, I made up a story about a young frog named Emily and her little brother, Owen. I would tell it to her in chapters whenever she demanded, "Tonight, story time with Daddy." The story, which was supposed to end in fifteen minutes at her bedtime on a fall evening two years ago, dragged on as we added her friends as characters.
Some characters came from daycare, some from preschool, and some from kindergarten. We also made up some funny new names and added a variety of pets to play parts. Despite the number of characters now approaching a few dozen, I sometimes feel like I never want this story to end. I cannot even remember their names or which pets belonged to which kids.
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Some characters came from daycare, some from preschool, and some from kindergarten. We also made up some funny new names and added a variety of pets to play parts. Despite the number of characters now approaching a few dozen, I sometimes feel like I never want this story to end. I cannot even remember their names or which pets belonged to which kids.
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| Summer 2026 |
There’s nothing special about turning seven. It’s not a milestone or anything particularly symbolic. I mean most people would say that turning one, five, ten, fifteen, eighteen, twenty-one, twenty-five, thirty, and every decade you stack afterwards serves as a milestone in their lives. There is nothing special about turning seven, yet there is everything special about it for a parent.
A self-proclaimed - and perceived - early success as a dad to me came in helping her maintain a healthy distance from being a kid raised by Barbie and video games and instead encouraging her to indulge with me in things, hobbies and activities that are “more fun” and have real-life functionalities. And the accolades I received in return, aside from cuddles, kisses, and giggles, were often her saying, “Daddy, you’re so much fun! Most dads are boring; they just work and don’t do anything fun or take their kids outside. But we do so many fun things.”
A year close to the end of her formative years, the leap to seven from four or even five appeared to be immense. A denser emotional landscape soaked with care and affection - whether whether for the dogs, other animals, wildlife, nature, her friends and parents - and an understanding of her own feelings and how to try to regulate them became hallmarks of the age.
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It’s been weeks, and this wiggly tooth seems to have become a slow-motion comedy and at the same time a deep philosophical crisis for her. Almost every other day, she comes to me saying, while dangling that tooth all the way down and then up with her tongue, “Daddy, see this? I think it might fall off today.” She has been saying this for two weeks, and the tooth is still there, almost about to fall today just like every other day over the past two weeks. One of her close friends and classmates, S*, even said to her, “M*, you should just pull it out.” She herself has lost six teeth by now, giving my girl all the reasons to feel competitive. Probably it’s the only time in our life we are so excited and desperately eager to see a skeleton or bone, or whatever they’re, fall off our body.
Aside from the two real dogs, at home she has her own army of loyal, silent, soft friends: stuffed toy animals. Tiger, cheetah, snow leopard, sloth, giraffe, kangaroo, bunny, dog, cat, and, of course, unicorns - a major American cultural phenomenon. They are so many that it’s not possible to name them all, but some of her favorite ones have name given. There is one - a chosen one every other week - that she sleeps with every night and the rest guards her all night, just like Royal, our actual dog, a German Shepherd, who’d sleep all night down the stairs, close to her room, keeping vigil all night, but mostly desperately waiting for me to wake up.
Over the years, alliances and friends have come and gone from her life. Sometimes they bonded quickly with the speed of a lightening strike, exactly like how we adults do at times, sometimes the friendships lasted as long as the situation allowed it to flourish, with some lasting the duration of a school year and others lasting a few hours from the start to the end of her birthday parties.
Friendships during formative years are not like geopolitical alliances that have to be formed through mutual respect, shared values, open dialogues, and long-term stability.
With this cycle of friendships beginning and ending via spells of rejection, acceptance, and situational changes providing a real-life encounter with the the volatility and transience of human relationships, this whole saga of connections and disconnections at the end of formative years seems like an important rehearsal for adult life. It’s not until when we are fully grown up mentally we understand that every breakup and heartbreak is not the end of the world.
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| Spring 2026 |
Over the years, alliances and friends have come and gone from her life. Sometimes they bonded quickly with the speed of a lightening strike, exactly like how we adults do at times, sometimes the friendships lasted as long as the situation allowed it to flourish, with some lasting the duration of a school year and others lasting a few hours from the start to the end of her birthday parties.
Friendships during formative years are not like geopolitical alliances that have to be formed through mutual respect, shared values, open dialogues, and long-term stability.
With this cycle of friendships beginning and ending via spells of rejection, acceptance, and situational changes providing a real-life encounter with the the volatility and transience of human relationships, this whole saga of connections and disconnections at the end of formative years seems like an important rehearsal for adult life. It’s not until when we are fully grown up mentally we understand that every breakup and heartbreak is not the end of the world.
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What were events of the past, memories cherished long ago, became a thing of the present this summer when she went to summer camp at the same daycare she attended as an infant. Most of the staff were the same, the inside of the building had the same smell, the same sort of dim lightings (to help younger kids take naps), the same narrow corridors, and the same playground in the backyard where she played every day for a few years and had her early socialization.
One afternoon when I went to pick her up from the summer camp, her teacher, Miss K*, the same teacher who had looked after her when she was one, said to me how big she had become. She said how it feels like just a few years ago when she was a tiny baby, and that now she tells her stories from her life - about doing workouts with daddy and that she could do single-hand pushups, going for early morning walks and that once she walked nine miles in a week, going to trails and forests where she saw snakes twice.
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One afternoon when I went to pick her up from the summer camp, her teacher, Miss K*, the same teacher who had looked after her when she was one, said to me how big she had become. She said how it feels like just a few years ago when she was a tiny baby, and that now she tells her stories from her life - about doing workouts with daddy and that she could do single-hand pushups, going for early morning walks and that once she walked nine miles in a week, going to trails and forests where she saw snakes twice.
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| Spring 2026 |
As Joan Didion famously wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” In so many ways, we are the sum of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Ending a story, a piece of art, a scientific discovery, or a philosophical idea indicates a totality and fullness that often doesn’t exist in life. In this way, a single ending is only possible by forcing the creator to pick a single truth and disregard infinite other possibilities. However, in the end, that ending is the optic through which the entire journey is judged.
Nothing would really matter if things lasted forever. According to the second law of thermodynamics, it’s natural for things to transition from a stable equilibrium to a state of chaos. When we drop a glass cup, it shatters and never puts itself back together again.
Being human necessitates that we think in narratives. We are bound to look for a structure of a conclusion and completeness in order to make sense of things. Without the boundary of an ending, how can we appreciate the present or recognize our own growth?
