The journey is an ever changing course, not a flat path or paved road. It harbors surprises and curves and twists. It also harbors, somewhere within, the thing feared most. The end.
Endings are normal and necessary. They will come to everything and everyone, eventually. Yet they are dreaded and mourned. Some rage against the storm, clinging to life no matter the price to the bitter end. Yet for most of us, throughout our entire existence, we act as if it’s a far flung event of “someday.”
As our journey progresses there will be many last times. But most of them we won’t realize until after the fact. The last time we talk to a loved one, the last time we visit home while it’s still home. The last time we walk on the beach, say goodbye, leave our house, hug our loved ones. Most of us don’t think about it when we finish a day and load up to head home. We just take the often well worn path we’ve tread dozens of times before.
The journey’s biggest mystery is its end. Where is it lurking? How far are we going to get? I often stand looking out at the water after a kayak run, back at the river from wince I just came and wonder, will this be the last time? Because I grew up looking through a different lens. A lens where death was a part of the family, always present, not feared, not loathed, just there, amongst us. You see, he visited our family often and young.
To some it was a comfort to know that an end was inevitable. The grief they lived on the daily would have been far too much to bear if it had to go on indefinitely. It was an unusual existence. There’d been a lot of trauma, obviously. Through our lens the end wasn’t entirely unwelcome and suffering was far more feared than the release that came with death’s gentle nudge. So we learned early on to expect endings, in many cases to even embrace them.
Death, you see, doesn’t only come to one’s life, it comes to many little places in between. Relationships being the first and probably most frequent. But also to jobs, homes, livelihoods, one’s place in so many ways. We end a million little ways long before our final end. In our family we learned to let the relief that comes with some endings wash over us in acceptance. Not to fight the inevitable so fiercely. The sooner you let go, the sooner you can get on with what comes next.
And from endings come new beginnings. Whether it’s a death that fractures lives, closing doors to our current existence, or the end of a way of life, friendships, school, jobs that have run their course, whatever the ending, from it springs beginnings. It may not be a welcome thing at first, because no one seems to like change. But change has its place in this world. It’s the thing that razes the old to make way for the new. It twists our path to more fertile grounds than we thought to go. It’s the thing that drives growth.
There comes a time in each of our lives when we have to initiate various endings. Again, often relationships spring to mind. But there are many others, the chapters of our lives have to be closed, their debts settled, so that we can progress in our journey’s. Graduations, moving, changing jobs, changing careers entirely, changing friends which is usually more subtle. There are all sorts of endings within our journey and we need to embrace them as the change that is needed to grow. We need to pull up our lenses and get a wide view of the situation before focusing in on the details and deciding what needs to be adjusted.
It helps if we can see the change that needs to happen and initiate the endings for ourselves to the things that are no longer serving us. To focus ahead and see where the dead ends are so we may embrace the curves toward better paths in our journey. Help ourselves by looking ahead to foresee at least some of those endings so we can guide our path effectively. Embrace the changes as they come, take them in stride and maximize the benefits.
