Nothing Ever Ends Well

Things end because they cannot be continued. Understand this to not imperil the beginnings that must follow endings.

Photo by Frank Albrecht on Unsplash

The things you are currently doing, the ones you’ve embarked on, they’ll end, and they won’t end well. They won’t end well because nothing ever does. Those imagining a beautiful ending are probably romanticizing. There’s nothing wrong with this, except for two things. A fixation on a colorful ending can lead one to abandon a cause unnecessarily, and an obsession with a previous messy ending can see one become too scared to start over.

Most people don’t think of endings at the start of something and when they do, they imagine them in the context of the energy and enthusiasm of beginnings. They take what they have at the start, and they see an opposite (or a diminished version of the beginning). They see they can take that, and it becomes the justification for action. But things hardly end this well. If they would, they wouldn’t end.

Most empires are a shell of themselves by the time they collapse—or wane to the point of becoming irrelevant. They leave b…