The Power of Reframing Endings
For most events in life, there’s a beginning, a middle and an end. Rationally, this is a simple thought to accept. In practice however, the end can feel uncomfortable, emotional, or even dreaded. Endings and change can feel sad or final. Sometimes endings can even feel like failure. However, dreading or avoiding endings could potentially rob us of possibilities for progress and growth. Endings are simply transitions, and life is guaranteed to be full of those.
What if you reframed your thoughts around life transitions, or endings, to promote happiness and growth? Endings are a normal, inevitable, and important part of being alive — like graduations or the new year. Rather than feeling defeated by life's transitions, what if you focused on what you have learned and gained. Unfortunately, common attitudes toward endings – whether of relationships or careers – is much less sanguine. Everyone wants the movie-style “happy ending” of getting married or landing a dream job. However life doesn’t roll its credits after those high notes, and when careers or families don’t endure, nobody breaks out the champagne and party hats. Instead, it's often believed that these endings are tragic failures. By shifting your perspective, you could think of endings as a natural part of life.
Graduating from high school, moving out of your childhood home, and graduating from college all entail an ending, which probably felt exciting and promising. I'm sure you can recall a time where you've felt ready to take on the challenges of the unknown. You likely viewed those life transitions as positive changes. However, between childhood and adulthood, you may have experienced a radical shift in your beliefs about the value of change. Standards of life-long stability in our relationships, marriages, homes, and careers are imposed on you. People often undertake strenuous, sometimes depleting, efforts to ensure continuity. But as any parent, Buddhist, or biologist will tell you, life is continuous change. Besides death and taxes, change is the one thing you can count on. You develop and change over the course of your life, reaching different stages, developing different perspectives, and becoming different physically, intellectually and emotionally. Dread of change is also, unintentionally, a rejection of progress. If nothing ever changes, then it can’t — and you can’t — get better. The tendency to make continuity the primary focus means you overlook the dividends of the serious investments of time, energy, self-control and brain power that you invest in relationships and careers over time. Hopefully, like children advancing grade to grade, you learn enough to prepare for the next stage in your life, as a friend, a partner, a parent or a worker.
Instead of feeling like you've failed when a chapter ends, perhaps you could remember that feeling when you graduated, focusing on growth, rather than loss. Instead of being furious at the person or event that pushed you out into the world, perhaps you could embrace them as liberators, or mentors to whom you are grateful. After all, they taught you well, even when what you learned includes that the person or thing that you loved and hoped might last, is no longer right for you. And sometimes the most important change you can make is to remove yourself from an unfit situation. Even negative circumstances can bear important lessons about what to avoid in the future, and your own courage to escape and stand on your own.
While endings can be painful, and a long-term relationship or job shouldn’t be ended lightly, many endings are likely to be part of your life. Embrace the inevitability of change that is life and view yourself as a graduate of the school of life. Rather than feeling defeated by the passing of any life stage, try focusing your energy on the opportunity ahead. As with each new year, every major life transition should be a time to think about what you have gained and celebrate your progress. As 2024 gets underway, I hope you resolve to embrace the endings in your life with grace, humor, and most of all, gratitude.
Source::https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/human-development-for-dummies/202401/the-joy-of-endings
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