The woman is exiting an elevator. To many eyes, the photograph looks "unfinished" – a mistake.

   The snapshot, with its ghost images & shower of hair, is more appealing & mysterious to me in its "imperfection". An odd observer of the world, I take pictures like this all the time.

   John O'Donohue writes that we naturally associate beauty with perfection, "but there can also be great beauty in something that is imperfect and unfinished."

   He cites Durer's Salvator Mundi. It shows Jesus with his right hand raised in blessing. O'Donohue suggests, "This unfinished painting achieves the happy accident of enabling the beauty and radiance of a divine face to shine from a human body."

   Shubert's Unfinished Symphony is a masterwork. It might be better than if "completed."

   At the end of any given day you may leave behind unfinished work. That will be true of your lifetime.

   Some things, obviously, must be completed. Yet, art does not always need our hand's punctuation.

   Perhaps, at your life's end, others will discover beauty in your incomplete as well as finished work. Also, are you also creating something now that calls to you to stop lest you damage the beauty already there?

   Is anything you do ever truly complete? How many things have you discarded as unfinished & thus missed the muffled voice of their song?

-Erie Chapman

Photograph: "Woman Exiting Elevator" – Erie Chapman