The paradoxical grief of completion
by Steve Xoh

I recently completed the kayaking stage of my River Thames Project. I only decided to use a kayak back in May, so I completed it in a relatively short space of time: eleven trips over three months. During that time I experienced a familiar paradox. I felt compelled to complete it as quickly as I could whilst also knowing, deep down, that I would feel a sense of sadness and loss as soon as I had. I’ve experienced this many times before and know it isn’t simply a case of imagining that achieving a goal will change anything significant. For me, it feels much more nuanced and confusing than that.

In the 1920s, the Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik investigated an intriguing observation that waiters seemed remarkably good at remembering unpaid orders but quickly forgot them once the bill had been settled. This became known as the Zeigarnik Effect: the tendency for unfinished tasks to occupy our minds more readily than completed ones. It helps explain why cliffhangers are so compelling, why awkward conversations linger in our thoughts and why half-finished jobs seem to demand our attention long after we’ve stopped working on them.

The Zeigarnik Effect is usually presented as an argument for the satisfaction of completion: finishing a task releases the mental tension created by leaving it unfinished. But I wonder whether, for me, there is something else going on. I wonder whether I actually find meaning in dwelling within the mental tension of something that is incomplete but within my power to complete. I experience this to a lesser extent when I discover a new television series that I love. I can’t help but binge-watch as many episodes as I can, even though I know that every episode I watch brings the ending closer.

Donald Winnicott, a British psychoanalyst, believed that much of what makes life meaningful happens in what he called potential space. He described this as an intermediate area that exists somewhere between our inner world of imagination and the external world of objective reality. It is neither entirely fantasy nor entirely real, but a place where we play, create, imagine and make meaning. Winnicott saw this as one of the most important aspects of healthy human development, arguing that creativity is not simply something artists do, but a way of engaging with life itself.

For Winnicott, children first encounter potential space through play. A teddy bear is neither simply a toy nor a living companion, yet for a child it can become both at once. As we grow older, this capacity transfers from toys to things like art, music, literature, religion, relationships and other creative practices. Whenever we become deeply absorbed in something that feels simultaneously real and imagined, structured yet free, we are inhabiting potential space.

This makes me wonder whether I experience an unfinished project with a well-defined end point as a kind of potential space. The tension between wanting to complete it as soon as possible whilst also wanting to savour it and not let it end seems to invite me into a wonderfully meaningful state of flow that I have come to find quite addictive.

I find it helpful to consider that it is never really the project that enchants me, but the potential space that opens up through the tension between completion and incompletion. Perhaps that tension is not something I am trying to eliminate at all, but the very condition that allows this psychological landscape to exist. Once the project is finished, that landscape quietly collapses. This helps me realise that what I have previously thought of as post-project grief may not be the loss of the project itself, but the loss of the psychological landscape that the project had opened up for me.

This leaves me contemplating a rather beautiful paradox. The only way I can continue inhabiting this strange psychological landscape is to keep moving towards the very thing that will eventually make it disappear.