I have spent much of the last few years thinking about what it means to live authentically.

When I began writing The Architecture of Authenticity, I was still inclined to think of authenticity primarily as a problem of coherence. How do the different parts of a life hold together? How do we become persons whose convictions, relationships, work, public actions, and spiritual lives are recognizably our own?

I still think those questions matter. But somewhere in the writing, another question began to replace them.

How much coherence do we actually need before we can live?

Near the end of the book, two old friends, Lek and Kelly, spend a day clearing Kelly’s office.

Kelly is recently retired. His office still looks as though a working life has simply stopped in the middle of a sentence. Books crowd the shelves. Papers and conference programs remain from decades of professional life. The desk occupies the centre of the room.

At first, Kelly thinks the problem is a bookcase. Lek, an architect, sees something else.

The room has been organized around the desk. Everything else has learned to live around it. Visitors sit across from Kelly as though they have come for an appointment. The room carries the accumulated architecture of a professional identity that once served him well.

But Kelly no longer needs the room to do what it once did.

So the two men begin moving things.

Some books stay because they still teach him something. Others stay because gratitude has attached itself to them. Some leave because their work is finished. Eventually, they move the desk away from the centre and place two chairs beside a small table near the window.

Nothing dramatic has been added. Space has appeared.

That scene gradually became important to me for reasons I did not entirely understand when I first began writing it. We often imagine personal growth as accumulation. We need another insight, another experience, another explanation, another achievement. We imagine that if we can understand ourselves thoroughly enough, we will finally arrive at the person we were meant to become.

But perhaps maturity sometimes looks more like making room. We keep what has formed us without allowing it to occupy all the available space. That applies to ideas. It applies to traditions. It applies to the judgments of parents and teachers whose voices we may still hear years after they are gone. It applies even to our own explanations of ourselves.

We need some of these things. They give our lives form. But they do not need to determine how everyone enters the room.This has changed the way I understand authenticity.

I no longer think authenticity means discovering some final, hidden self and then arranging the rest of life around it. Nor do I think it means endlessly reinventing ourselves whenever an inherited identity begins to feel restrictive.

We receive much more of ourselves than either picture acknowledges. We inherit languages before we can evaluate them. We are loved before we understand what love requires. We receive traditions containing both wisdom and blindness. Other people recognize capacities in us before we know how to name them ourselves. We also inherit wounds, expectations and fears whose influence may become visible only much later.

Then, somewhere along the way, we become responsible for what we have received. That responsibility does not require us to possess a complete explanation of ourselves.

In fact, one of the things writing this book has made me increasingly suspicious of is the desire for final explanations.

A final explanation can feel like freedom because it promises to settle things. This is who I am. This is why that happened. This is what my life means. Sometimes we genuinely need to say such things. A person incapable of making any commitment at all cannot sustain promises, relationships or meaningful action.

But our explanations can also become another form of control. Other people remember things differently. Consequences disclose meanings we did not intend. Time alters our understanding of decisions that once seemed obvious. The traditions that formed us sometimes need to be challenged using capacities those very traditions helped us acquire.

Truthfulness therefore requires something more demanding than certainty. It requires answerability. I need to be able to say what I believe while leaving enough room to hear what I have missed. I need to accept responsibility for my actions without pretending that my interpretation is the only possible account of them. I need to remain capable of conviction without granting sovereignty to my convictions.

And I need to act before all of this is settled.

That may be the discovery from the book that has surprised me most.

An unfinished life is not necessarily a failed life.

There will always be boxes beside the door.

There will be relationships we do not completely understand, inherited structures we are still deciding whether to preserve, convictions being tested by experience, apologies that cannot restore what was lost, and questions whose answers have not yet arrived.

Yet life does not wait for the renovation to be complete.

We can still pull two chairs toward one another.

We can keep a promise.

We can listen.

We can repair something.

We can resist what needs resisting.

We can receive something we did not earn.

We can make room for another person.

My Christian faith has increasingly taught me to describe part of this as grace. I do not mean that everything works out, or that suffering becomes good because something worthwhile later emerges from it. I mean something simpler: not everything valuable in a human life can be produced through effort or secured through control.

Love cannot be manufactured. Forgiveness can be sought but cannot be compelled. Another person’s freedom cannot be possessed. Even some of the deepest goods in our lives arrive through circumstances we could never have arranged.

Perhaps grace allows us to stop carrying the burden of making the whole life come out correctly. That does not relieve us of responsibility. It may make responsibility possible.

If I do not need the future to vindicate every decision I have ever made, I can admit that I was wrong. If another person’s life does not depend upon my interpretation of it, I can listen. If I do not have to possess the whole truth before acting, I can make the best judgment available to me and remain open to correction.

This is a less spectacular understanding of authenticity than the promise to “find yourself.” It is also, I think, a more inhabitable one.

Perhaps the question is not finally, Have I discovered who I really am?Perhaps it is: What has been entrusted to me now? Whom do I need to hear? What needs repairing? What should I resist? What can I promise?And what might I simply receive? There may never be a moment when the whole architecture is finished.

There is still enough to live by. So live before the whole answer arrives.