New Year’s Eve in Amsterdam is an anarchic affair.
Instead of an official firework display, carefully constructed and safely let off across a large body of municipal water, anyone can buy fireworks at the shop and on the 31st – they just let them off. Anywhere. All day long.
At midnight anything that’s left is let off all at once. It’s loud, dangerous and a helluva lot of fun. It marked the end of this year perfectly.
And the end of the year only means one thing.
I’m almost at the end – of Amsterdam. By my calculations I only have seven weeks left of the snow and the ice before I head back south and resume, recreate, reassess a life in Sydney. There’ll be much to say about that once I get there but I have this week found myself thinking about endings.
Life is really just a series of unrelated events that have no structure or form and in order to make sense of this lack of structure we create stories/narratives. When we tell a story about an event that happened to us, it’s inherent in the telling that we already know the end. We already frame the telling of the story by knowing exactly where we’re going to end it, in many ways we only tell a story to get to the ending – that’s almost always the point.
It’s a feature inherent to most therapy that the way we understand life is by making it into a story. We construct and create a narrative so that things make sense. That’s why we gossip about other people, why we read about celebrities, why we watch TV or a movie, why we go to the theatre or read a book or a biography.
The way a relationship ends inevitably determines the way we talk about the way it began. We say things like “I should have known it would end that way because when we met…”. More than that, the way something ends determines the way we talk about how it was – and what it means to us.
(I also have a theory that relationships are about a shared narrative. Once you start telling a different story – or once one of you stops believing in the shared myth that you have created together, the relationship ends. That’s of course a simplistic version – but it’s also a topic for another day.)
How do we end a story? Why do we place so much importance on the end rather than the middle or the beginning? If there are no actual endings in life, why do we insist on making ones up?
Take New Year’s Eve. It’s really just another day, the seasonal argument doesn’t even apply – there is no natural renewal of the seasons – it’s just a random date. In Australia the end of the year is in summer and that feels like a natural way to start a new year. The long hot days lead into a lazy, sunny January and so we begin the year slowly – in a haze of hot days and humid nights. That’s always made sense to me and gives the year a natural closure. And yet here I trudged through snow on New Year’s Eve, summer is months away and we are existing in a series of cold, dark days – yet it still felt like the end of a long year.
And I still felt as though I was able to shrug the weight of the old year off my shoulders and stand up a little straighter on New Year’s Day knowing that I could somehow start again. That 2009 was at an end and 2010 was there before me – fresh, clean and new.
But that must have been something I constructed because I needed the sense of an ending. I needed to put the year behind me so I could feel as though there was something fresh to start again with.
So maybe that’s what a good ending actually is. A place where we can naturally put a certain story behind us and give ourselves the space to start a new one.
The best endings in fiction are ones that do this – all of the possible threads of the story have been resolved and there is nothing left for our protagonist to do but leave that story behind and get on with a fresh start, a new beginning. Armed with knowledge and experience and ready to begin something new, to walk into the space that’s ahead of the place where the story ends. It doesn’t have to be a positive space, in some of my favourite stories the space that yawns in front of the lead character is a depressing mess – but it’s a new depressing mess.
Endings matter. They matter in storytelling and they matter in life. Sometimes we need to start a new chapter and so we have to celebrate and mark the closing of the previous one. We carry all our previous chapters with us, they inform all the ones ahead of us – but sometimes it’s good to carouse, make merry, cry, drink too much, let off some fireworks and proclaim the end.
And then start all over again.
….. and they all laughed.
There, a perfect ending ( if you’re ever stuck for one ).