Field Note#5: Why The Mind Hates an Unfinished Story

It was 11 p.m., and I sat by the open living room window waiting for my Dad to arrive from the airport. He was almost three hours late, and there was no way I could get in touch with him, thanks to the sanctions against Russia and all that nonsense.

To say I was worried would have been an understatement. Gone were the days of a straightforward three-and-a-half-hour EasyJet flight from Moscow to Manchester; now there were no direct flights at all. In fact, there weren't even direct routes over Europe. Dad had travelled via Abu Dhabi this time, turning what used to be a short journey into one that lasted well over twenty-four hours.

That alone would have been enough to make me anxious. The fact that he should have been here three hours earlier only made it worse.

I knew his plane had landed. So what could possibly have happened after that?

I checked the train times. Everything seemed to be running normally, and there was no mention of any cancellations. Dad had been adamant that he wasn't taking a taxi, so it couldn't have been an accident on the motorway.

Maybe his suitcase had gone missing? It’s happened before. But even then, he would have filled in the paperwork and eventually made it home. An hour late, perhaps. Even two.

So... customs?

With all the political absurdity, could they have detained him simply because he was Russian? Surely not. Dad had travelled to the UK countless times over the years and had held more visas than I could remember. That couldn't possibly have been the reason. But still...

Remembering one particularly idiotic episode from my own life, my imagination was more than capable of inventing ridiculous explanations. Once, the airport security had effectively arrested my suitcase because the X-ray showed what looked like a fire extinguisher inside it. It wasn't a fire extinguisher at all: it was a wine rack shaped like one. And yet, it took them three days to investigate.

Armed with that memory, I was able to imagine a million different reasons why Dad hadn't arrived. And not one of them was true.

By the time I'd decided that if he wasn't home by three in the morning I'd go to the airport and look for him myself, I heard a familiar sound just outside the front door. The wheels of a suitcase rolling across the pavement. Dad was home. The baggage reclaim had taken forever. Then his train had been cancelled—a cancellation that, according to every website I'd checked, hadn't happened. 

The most interesting part wasn't that I had imagined all those possibilities - it’s the fact that every single one of them felt real. Not because I had any evidence, but because I had no evidence whatsoever. 

My mind kept working and jumped from one scenario to another, trying to envisage every possible explanation, so that I could decide what to do next. If my Dad had been detained, I'd need to call someone. If he'd lost his passport, I'd have to get to the airport. If he'd been in an accident... well, that would be something else entirely.

Looking back, what fascinates me isn't that I worried - I would have worried anyway. It’s how the plot developed. Five minutes earlier, customs was just one possibility amongst many. A few minutes later, it had quietly become the most likely explanation. Then another one replaced it. Then another. Nothing outside my living room had changed - only the story inside my head.

Strangely, in situations like this, almost any answer would have been easier than no answer at all.

Is that why uncertainty feels so unbearable? The brain was never meant to sit comfortably with a blank page. It wants to know what happens next. It wants to know how to act, and simply not knowing feels like torture. Should we get ready to march into battle? Or do we need to run for our lives? Stay still and hope that we do not get eaten by a sabre-tooth tiger? None of those options makes much sense if we don't even know what we're dealing with. And so the brain does something rather fascinating: it starts writing the missing parts of the story.

Give the brain a missing piece of information, and it rarely says,

"I don't know."

Instead, it just quietly writes the missing chapter itself. Sometimes it's harmless. Sometimes it’s not.

Your friend hasn't replied to your message. Your boss says, "Can we have a chat tomorrow?". Someone walks past you without saying Hi. You send an email and hear nothing back. Within minutes, your mind has become an accomplished novelist - with numerous sophisticated plots available.

Maybe they hate me.

Maybe I've upset them.

Maybe I've done something wrong but for some reason they’re not telling me.

Maybe I'm going to lose my job.

None of these thoughts arrived because we uncovered new information - they arrived because there wasn't enough information. 

Imagine reading a novel with every third page missing. You wouldn't happily close the book and say, "I'll never know", would you? You'd start guessing. Who is the villain? Did they survive? Was it all a ridiculous misunderstanding? Your brain does exactly the same thing with everyday life, but except this time, that novel is your own future. 

The dangerous part isn't that the brain writes those stories—that's what it evolved to do. The dangerous part is that, after a while, we forget which parts actually happened...

...and which parts we wrote ourselves.

Perhaps, that's the really unfair part, where our emotions respond to that story rather than to the facts. We feel rejected before we've been rejected. We grieve losses that never happen. We become angry at conversations that exist only in our imagination. And our bodies respond to the stories we believe as though they're happening now. 

So, the most important question we can ask ourselves isn't "What am I feeling?" - it's "Which part of this story actually happened?"