One Apple A Day #142
It’s always hard to start something new. To get the ball rolling, and win the inertia of the existing status quo, it takes a lot of energy.
You can find plenty of posts explaining how to overcome the struggle of the beginning. The typical example is the massive amount of energy needed to win the gravitational force and launch a rocket.
But what about the end? Because everything ends, want it or not. So, how do you deal with the end? The first step is essential, but what about the last one? How important is to finish well?
A good ending to something can make the beginning of what next a lot easier, but I can’t find as much content on the end as I expected.
My experience is that the end is scarier than the beginning. It doesn’t matter if the whatever is going on is good or bad; the end is creepy.
If whatever we are experiencing is good we obviously don’t want it to end. If it’s bad at least, we know it, so we are worried about what will come after.
One way to deal with the end is to remind us the Law of Conservation of Mass-Energy by Einstein.
“The total amount of mass and energy in the universe is constant.”
That is based on the famous Law of Conservation of Mass: “matter is neither created nor destroyed” and the First Law of Thermodynamics saying that “energy is neither created nor destroyed”.
If nothing can be created or destroyed, there is no end, just the transformation into something new or different. Does it make the ending easier to manage? I don’t think so. Call it what you want but what was before is anymore.
The irony of all this digression on the ending of things is that I don’t know how to end this post. I decided to write about the end because I read an article discussing the various options to end a book or story. Like the fairy-tale ending, the tragic ending or the ambiguous one. And it made me think that one of the hardest things in life is to end something. I know it’s also hard to start, but there are plenty of books and articles on how to start. No one teaches us how to end.
How do you end a story? How do you know when it’s time to close something? How do you understand that something reached the last station? And even if you are aware that something is done, how do you close it?
I don’t know, yet. But this is the end for today. And this is a lesson. Some times we just run out of time, and the only option we have is to move on. Tomorrow we will start something new.