It all ends.
Relationships, connections, careers, and, ultimately, life itself.
But mortality aside, and without going into the metaphysics of what happens after our last breath, the ordinary “ends” of our lives always demand a new beginning—whether we want it or not.
Heartbreak forces us into new chapters of romance or solitary self-exploration. The same is true when a job, or whatever else informs our identity, suddenly shifts from the ground we know.
Over and over, after watching people get swallowed whole by circumstances, I have witnessed them emerge and pick up the pieces after the world as they knew it had tumbled. Humanity is filled with extraordinary resilience.
Ends are inevitable. What I have been thinking about, though, is the after.
What makes some people adept at moving forward, while others become paralyzed, getting stuck in narratives of victimhood, old identities, or past lives? Is resilience a mindset that can be cultivated over time? Or are some simply born with an innate wiring that makes them more capable of weathering the storm of change?
Certainly, our psychology, our upbringing, and our life experiences inform how we deal with the fractures. But for most of my life, I have been a firm believer—perhaps to a fault—that you simply have to move on.
My patience for hearing broken-record stories of old grievances is thin.
I want to give people the space and time they need to heal. I believe in providing a safe space for people to be heard. But I struggle when the needle gets stuck in the groove, playing the same track of suffering over and over. In those moments, I fight the urge to yell: “How is this serving you? Move on. There is no point in drowning in self-pity or anchoring yourself to a situation that brings you nothing but misery.”
Being uprooted to a new country, losing my parents at different stages of my life, and experiencing the grief that came after my wife died have given me the armor that informs my impatience. My tolerance, I admit, is limited.
Sure, there is no moratorium on the time it takes to “get over” pain and sorrow. We all move at our own pace. But I wonder how many of us use our grievances as crutches. What might have served as a necessary shield at one point in your life can easily become the weight that hinders your progress later.
I don’t know what to offer someone in the midst of their tumbling – maybe nothing beyond presence and patience at the outset of the wreckage, without trying to fix or force a timeline to get over things.
Ultimately, however, when we have sat with our emotions and wrestled in the arena of our sorrow, however long that might be, we have to reclaim authorship.
There will always be plot twists we didn’t ask for and endings that break our hearts. How we choose to write the next chapter is within our power.
Coffee With John 