Life is as much endings as it is beginnings and maintenance.
But I never got taught how to close things down, and entrepreneurs don’t easily tell the stories of the business ideas that failed or the companies that folded. We talk about startups, not shutdowns. We teach whole courses about how to get new jobs, and none about how to leave old ones.
There’s a bias toward Genesis and origin stories, and it won’t always serve me.
As the wild animals in my yard taught me recently, every process has two ends and a middle: birds that ingest seed will also digest it and egest it. I can’t contribute to the ingestion stage and expect to escape its outputs!
So too with writing, and projects, and relationships of all kinds: I can’t build a life on beginnings alone and also need to learn to end things well.
Please share your how-to-handle-endings wisdom with me on Twitter.