From “Encouraging Words” by Robert Aitken (an American Zen teacher):

“This month I would like to suggest Completion as one of our Perfections. One model of Completion is the way Japanese people say good-bye. Suppose you are leaving a home. You say good-bye in the living room, and then you say goodbye at the door. You walk down to the corner and turn around, and there in the distance are your hosts at the gate. You wave good-bye once again at that point. If you fail to turn around at the corner, your hosts will feel that their good-bye process was cut off before its completion and they will be disappointed. [...] Thich Nhat Hanh says, ‘Every act is a rite.’ The rite has a beginning, a middle, and an end. See it through. [...] Notice how you shut the sliding door to the dokusan room. Notice how you make your bows. Do you complete each action? When one action blurs into the next one, and that one into the next, our lives are deprived of definition, and the inspiration that can only come in the interstices has no chance to slip though.”