There’s a beauty in the things that almost happen. The feelings we almost express. The lyrics we almost write. The songs that live in fragments, never fully finished, but still deeply felt.
I’ve always been fascinated by the spaces between things—between intention and action, between silence and sound, between what is and what might have been. We’re told to finish what we start, to push through, to complete. But what if the unfinished holds its own kind of magic?
Lately, I’ve been surrounded by half-filled notebooks. Some pages are heavy with words, others are blank except for a line or two. And yet, I return to them often. There’s something magnetic about a thought that’s only halfway formed—like a door left ajar, inviting you to peek inside, but never fully step through.
I’ve been learning to appreciate those moments. The seconds where I start to sing but stop. The phrases that spill out mid-thought, then vanish. The melodies that trail off into nothing. I used to see them as failures—now I see them as breaths. Pauses. Quiet declarations that not everything needs to be complete to be meaningful.
A few weeks ago, I found an old draft of a song. The chorus had never come together, and the bridge was barely a whisper. But I played it again anyway. And somehow, even in its incompletion, it moved me. Maybe it was the rawness. The vulnerability of something that never tried to be perfect.
I think we underestimate how much life happens in those moments. The almosts. The not-yets. The could-have-beens. We talk about journeys, but we rush toward endpoints. We forget that art lives in the sketch, in the gesture, in the space where we haven’t quite decided.
As I write this, there’s an unfinished piano loop playing in the background. I’ve looped it dozens of times. It goes nowhere. It doesn’t resolve. And still, it holds something. A pulse. A question. Maybe even an answer, though I wouldn’t dare to name it.
Some of my favorite lyrics I’ve ever written weren’t planned. They were found—between lines, in discarded scraps, or in the stillness of a night where nothing else would come. I’ve started keeping a folder called “Almost.” It’s filled with voice memos, poems, guitar riffs, half-thoughts. Not because I plan to finish them all, but because they matter as they are. Incomplete. Honest. Alive.
I’m learning that clarity is overrated. There’s strength in ambiguity. In softness. In letting a song be what it is, without forcing it into form. Sometimes the unfinished speaks louder than anything polished ever could.
So I’m giving myself permission to create without finality. To share without perfection. To let the almosts stay almost. Because maybe that’s where the soul of the work lives—in the openness. In the mystery.
In the art of almost.
B.
