my substack is now named "unfinished gardens." what's up with that?

16 Jan, 2026

i couldn't decide on a name for my substack for the longest time. was it about introspection? fiction? overthinking things? i tend to do that a lot. wait a minute, i'm doing it here...

well, in a shining example of active introspection, the name of the blog only came after having published a couple posts. but what does it mean, exactly? let's take it one word at a time:

unfinished. a motif of the last few years of my life has been letting go of my titanium-reinforced grasp on perfectionism. i can't keep waiting for the perfect moment to arrive. i don't want to grow old waiting for myself to be okay. i'm ready now, unfinished as i am! i am a verb, not a noun.

gardens. i love the vocabulary that a garden invokes. on the one hand, there is structure and order in the face of entropy. the gardener asserts his dominance over the elements, breaks the back of the earth to accept his chosen flora, hacks away at weed and rot with an unyielding sickle.

yet this act of creation is not ultimately up to the gardener, is it? the flowers bloom in their own time. the gardener's job is to cultivate and tend with a watchful eye: to radically accept the world as it is, to take action to the best of his ability, and to surrender control of the outcome.¹ this is what i mean by gardens.

there is a quote here from shani's excellent 21 observations from people watching that i'll place here:

Some people are more like closed fists, others are more like open palms. Many of the driven people I have met are closed fists: warm, charming, and ready to punch through a wall at any point in time. There is a rigidity, a tunnel vision that naturally follows grasping for certain outcomes. An open palm has an expansive, receptive quality. They may still be incredibly intense and engaged with the world, but they are fluid, not forceful, in nature.

my aim is to embody the open palm. i want to pursue excellence on both the inner and outer path. i want to have a positive impact on the world in this intense and fluid manner. steel wrapped in silk.²

so, what's next for me in pursuit of this? besides various in-the-real-world actions, i want to create a third blog³, where i publish Serious Pieces on Serious Topics, in a holden karnofsky-esque learn by writing way. three blogs makes sense: a secret blog where any dribble is accepted and where the critic has no reign; a personal blog where my good friends can receive my thoughtbeams; a professional-ish blog that actively engages with the external world. i'm inspired here by jason hausenloy's Uppercase Site and lowercase site. it's probably best to separate my concerns!