In writing, or in life.
In journalism, it’s pretty easy to make up for this personal quirk. I’ve got finite word counts, and deadlines, and if I get a good quote I can always let the subject have the last word. There are controls in place; like it or not, I gotta write the end of the story.
In other forms of writing, it can be a little easier to put off writing an ending. Eventually, though, I have to make myself set it down in text, good or bad.
But in life?
Life is fluid and messy and full of change. It’s easy to get distracted, to get caught up in everything else, to ignore all the signs that a big change — an end — is coming, and maybe needs to be written. I let it go. I hope something happens to change my course. I think very hard about not thinking about it.
I’m not sure why I’ve got this aversion to endings, but I know I’m not the only one who does. I got the strong feeling in late 2016 and early this year that a lot of people were trying very hard to ignore, or at least downplay, an imminent, encroaching change in the country’s weather. An end. And like Ian Malcolm says in Crichton’s Jurassic Park, “All major changes are like death. You can’t see to the other side until you are there.”
Maybe that’s what it is about endings. The signs of the change coming to America, at least, portended for many a death of sorts, perhaps the death of hope itself.
When my relationship of more than a decade underwent an irrevocable change — in many very real ways, an end — this year, I’d known it was coming, and I’d ignored it at not only my own peril but that of my wife. And when it happened, I quite literally wondered if my life was over. That’s how earth-shaking it was. It didn’t feel like a change, or even “an” end, it felt like THE END, those six capital letters announcing the story was over.
But my life didn’t end. (Of course it didn’t! How arrogant! How self-involved! How garment-rendingly melodramatic!) And my hope didn’t end. It was an ending of sorts, but hardly THE END — not for me, not even for us.
Because I came to see it for what it was: the end of a chapter, not the story itself.
And maybe that’s all hope is, when you get right down to it.
The belief that an ending isn’t THE END, that there’s always another chapter to the story.
This past year wasn’t the whole story, either; it’s just a chapter. For many of us, it wasn’t a great one, or even a good one, but it’s coming to an end. And while even the ending of such a trashfire of a 12-month chapter of our lives might’ve given me angst in the past, I’m sort of looking forward to what’s next. We survived, we can still be hopeful, and it’s time to begin a different chapter.
How will you write 2018?
This article appears in Dec 28, 2017 – Jan 4, 2018.