A Meditation on Endings

Collecting Art, take a look

How Do You Meet Endings? I want to draw our attention to endings: the end of a day, the end of a meal, the end of something precious and rare, the end of this sentence. How do you meet endings? I mean, most of us have some developed habits about the way in which we meet endings. Without any judgment or criticality, let’s just take a look to see what our relationship to endings are. Like, when you go to a party, or you go to a conference: Do you have a tendency to leave emotionally or mentally before the conference is over or before the party’s over? Or maybe you’re the one in the parking lot waving goodbye to everybody as they depart. Or maybe you find some way of cocooning yourself, isolating in some way, pulling back into a kind of protective stance. Do you try to shift it into some other form of relationship so that it will continue? Do you end it with a text? When a friend is sick and dying, do you go visit them? You have the freedom to change it, right here, right now. When an ending comes, what happens in your body? Does it bring about anxiety, fear, sadness? And what happens in your mind when endings come? How do you meet this experience? Exploring Endings and Beginnings The way that we end something shapes the way the next thing begins. When we hang on to the past, it limits our capacity to welcome the new. A lot of times we hang on because we’re still demanding something of the past, wanting it to give us more of what we’d hoped to get from that situation—more success, more love. When we hang on to the past, it limits our capacity to welcome the new. I used to run a preschool with a friend of mine, and we had these three- to five-year-olds that we would take into the outdoors. There, we would give them the task of collecting dead things, and the kids loved this. And then we’d bring them together and we’d lay out all of their discoveries on a blue tarp and in a grove of fir trees. And the kids had no fear—they were full of curiosity. And sometimes when they presented the item they found, they would weave a great story about it, like how this rusty old car part had fallen from a spaceship. Or this leaf was being used by a mouse—to keep him warm until summer came. I remember one little girl said to me, I think the trees are very kind that they allow the leaves to fall from them so that new ones can grow. It would be really sad if the tree couldn’t grow new leaves. We know that birth will end in death. We know that the coming together of things inevitably means their dispersion, and reflecting on this may cause us to live a life of simplicity, to really cherish and care for what we have. We know that everyone we love will one day die. Reflecting on this may cause us to think about how we want to care for them now. The study of endings is a beautiful way to step fully into our lives. Learning From the Breath And the breath can help us restore; it can revitalize our life. Breath offers us an extraordinary opportunity to look at our relationship to endings. Let the belly be soft; let the shoulders relax. Then you might notice that little gap, that pause, at the end of the exhale—maybe it’s just a nanosecond. Bring your attention fully and completely there. Do you find yourself anxious or feeling a sigh of relief? This pause: it’s a moment of faith or fear. Do you trust that the next breath will emerge? Can you relax with things just as they are? Breath is a microcosm of our whole life: coming and going, appearing and disappearing. As we settle, we begin to feel like the breath is breathing us. Relinquish your control of the breath and let it breathe you.