By embracing the end, you will start to see new beginnings.
Sure, some endings are good, like getting out of a bad job or unhealthy relationships, etc. But I’m not talking about that.
I’m talking about the things we don’t want to end, the ones that aren’t good. It can be as trivial as a great movie or show, or as serious as some major life change, or watching your baby grow up too fast.
It was a warm late summer morning, with golden rays of sun breaking through the trees, as the laughter of children rang through the air. Our firstborn was three and starting pre-school. It was his first day. We didn’t know how he would take us leaving him at school. It marked the first time he would ever be away from us. Our family was on the playground as other parents talked and the children ran around playing. Some kids were crying.
But ours wasn’t, and he didn’t.
When it was time for us to say goodbye, he almost didn’t care that we were leaving. We kissed, and he ran off with his new friends, unbothered.
When my wife and I got into our car to drive home, we found that we couldn’t. Instead, we sat there and watched him. We cried like babies as we realized that our child was no longer a baby.
Endings are everywhere. They happen every day.
Some endings just hurt. They’re hard. Really hard. They stun us. They may even kill a little bit of something inside of us. They can break our hearts. They make us cry in our car as we watch our baby growing up before our eyes.
Some of you are experiencing midlife. Like me, you feel it. And, it’s strange. It feels like you lost your youth somewhere along your journey, and you realize that you’ll never get it back. And you hate it.
Others of you are experiencing moving out of a city you love, losing a community, needing to find a new job, a loss of a career. And you’re having a hard time imagining what the future will hold because that end still has ahold of you.
All of us are feeling what the pandemic ended for us. Normal feels dead. The upcoming holidays smack us hard with that fact.
And the problem is that we often try to fight those endings. We’re wrestling against the realities that we live in.
But, we can’t fight aging, and sometimes, we have to move, find a new job—change.
Sometimes fighting only hurts us.
That’s why we must drop our fists and embrace the end.
When you do that, you see life as it is. You accept the truth. You’re no longer wasting your energy running against it, no. You see that fighting some endings is like trying to stop a wave from crashing the beach—impossible.
But, when you decide to let go of the past, that’s when something magical happens. You can see new potential, possibilities, opportunities.
You see, when you give in to the end, you welcome new beginnings.
You see that life isn’t ending. Instead, you are allowing yourself to change, evolve, even transform.
In midlife, you can take the learnings you gleaned in your youth and start to optimize your life. If you moved, you could start to appreciate your new home and begin to set new roots and make new friends. In the pandemic, you might see how good it is to work from home and how nice it feels to slow down.
See, an end isn’t the end. It’s a new beginning.
And when you stop trying to fight the ocean waves, you can begin to swim with them. And when you do that, they will propel you to new places and possibilities.
You won’t be trapped in the past. You’ll be present.
You’ll be free.
John Pa 