There are times in life when a person just simply gets tired. Not tired of work, not tired of responsibilities, not tired of people or of disappointments per se. Just tired of being in the world. Tired of carrying the weight of it all.
Yes for him the mornings start to become a bit repetitive and the nights are getting longer.
Things which once brought us joy now just seem colourless and the most mundane of tasks appear to require an absolutely ridiculous amount of strength.
It’s in moments like that you can have the odd thought: what if it all just ended?
Perhaps that thought isn’t always a desire to die. Sometimes it’s a desperate desire for change.
A desire for the pain to stop, for the memories to fade, for the pressure to go away, for the person we’ve been forced to become to at last just rest.
Some poems do this and Tennyson’s Crossing the Bar is one of the classic, enduring masterpieces.
Written in 1889 this is one of the most powerful poems ever written on the subject of death and the fact that every ending is either the end of life or the beginning of another journey.
Through the tide’s gentle ebb and flow Tennyson reminds us that ‘the word ending’ doesn’t necessarily mean the final departure from life or a total vanishing. It can also be a sign of entry into the world of some other journey, some other mystery or unknown.
Sometimes What Needs to End Is Not Life
Maybe the more pertinent question is not ‘how can life end’ but ‘what needs to end in order for life to become bearable again’?
Perhaps it’s a toxic relationship.
Perhaps it’s an impossible aspiration.
Perhaps it’s the idea that failure makes a person nothing at all.
Perhaps it’s years of pretending to be someone else.
Perhaps it’s just the habit of carrying every problem all on your own.
Sometimes we really need something to end. But sometimes that ending is actually a new beginning pretending to be an ending.
A chapter has to close before another can begin.
The Courage to Begin Again
Starting over is not always a big deal.
Sometimes ‘starting again’ means simply getting out of bed.
Sometimes you need to tell someone, honestly, “I am not okay.”
Sometimes it simply means seeing a doctor or a therapist.
Sometimes it means walking away from a place where you’ve been hurt over and over again.
Sometimes it means accepting that the dream you’ve spent ten years chasing is no longer the dream you want.
And sometimes it’s just about getting through today without the need for us to solve our entire lives tonight.
There’s courage in carrying on when there’s no applause for carrying on.
No-one celebrates the individual who simply decides to stay one more day. There’s no accolade for getting up one more morning. Yet it is precisely these small actions which can be the stepping stone from despair into recovery.
We Are More Than Our Worst Moment
One of life’s hardest tricks is making us believe that our current suffering shapes our whole lives.
It does not.
A person is not their failure.
A person is not their divorce.
A person is not their debt.
A person is not their rejection.
A person is not the nasty things someone said about them.
And a person absolutely isn’t the blackest thought that crossed their mind in their weakest moment.
Human beings are unfinished stories.
We have chapters that we’re absolutely proud of and chapters that we’d never have written. An incomplete story can’t be judged on the basis of a single page.
Endings don’t have to be the end.
Some endings are doors.
Some are turning points.
There are cases where the end of a life is a painful one as the life can no longer be supported.
And in some instances a chapter is just brought to an end prior to the next one beginning.
What’s most important is that your life shouldn’t be judged when it’s at its lowest ebb.
The story needn’t be closing the matter at all.
It could be asking for a change.