In search of happy endings

By The Standard | Jul. 28, 2017 | 5 Min read

Have you ever driven past a building site that just didn’t seem to progress? Or perhaps you’ve stumbled upon what appeared to be roadworks that were cordoned off for what seems like months without any sign of action actually happening. Or a group or club that someone started with high ambition and then it didn’t actually do anything? Have you ever registered a company and then failed to trade for years?

Opinion: Thembe Khumalo

We are good at starting many things, including start-up companies. We are not good at happy endings. Just look at our politics, our businesses, our relationships.

We find it hard to bring things to a useful conclusion, to part amicably, to step away from the microphone and generally, to finish strong.

Yes, starting things is a blast — the energy flows, the ideas ignite, and the momentum builds. But somewhere along the way, we seem to peter out: We lose interest, our enthusiasm wanes, and we begin to look around for the next big thing.

We do this when we buy a plot of land and fail to build on it for year; or when we start building and then, as friends say, “the money ran out”.

We sign up for courses to continue our education, or enrol online, but after a year or so, graduation becomes a less and less visible goal as other more pressing matters take precedence.

So what can we do to ensure that our endings are as happy and energetic as our beginnings? Creating happy endings isn’t easy — in fact it may even be more difficult that making exciting starts.

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Finishing strong, whether in a job, a project, a relationship or even a season, is something many of us struggle with for a number of reasons:

If you want to make a happy ending you cant afford to wait till you’re fed up. There is an old joke they used to tell about the person who consumes a delicious meal and says to his hostess “I’m fed up” when what he really meant to say was “I’m full up”. That small distinction can make the difference to an ending that is happy or one that just, well, isn’t.

You also can’t afford to wait until the other people involved are fed up with you. This applies especially to leadership. If you want an ending where you will be spoken well of, where people will remember the good that you did, how you helped them grow and where you helped them see themselves more clearly, you have to step away or step aside before anybody thinks of asking you.

Yes, this applies even if you are doing a great job. Your capacity to assess objectively becomes diminished the longer you stay in a position. Once there are calls for your exit, its late my friend!

Sometimes happy endings elude us because although we are indeed fed up, we lack the impetus or the courage to walk away. We are in a familiar space, and its comfortable.

We don’t know what lies on the other side of the camera, so we hang about in the spotlight, even as it dims; making a nuisance of ourselves, and even becoming a danger to ourselves and others.

The cure for this is to grow some balls, take the bull by the horns, and expedite that ending. You do more damage to yourself and to those you should be serving if you remain in a place that no longer interests or motivates you.

A happy ending is also usually preceded by a purposeful start. If you start out with a specific destination in mind, you’ll know when you’ve arrived, and the accomplishment will give you joy.

Otherwise, we wander aimlessly and waste both time and energy, feeling bleak and desperate when one or both run out.

Sometimes our failure to identify a specific goal is a result of fear: we are afraid to name our ambition, or we are too much in awe of the thing we desire and so we pretend that we don’t desire it — that way no one will know or care if we fail to achieve it.

If on the other hand we say out loud what it is we hope to achieve and then fail to achieve it, people will laugh at us, and that will make us feel foolish.

Additionally, not specifying the goal means we can keep moving the goalposts, even in internal conversations with ourselves. A typical example of this is chasing weight loss goals: “If I don’t tell anyone that I initially intended to lose 10kg, but I only lose three then I can just pretend that 3kg, was the intended goal all along…”

I don’t know who you think you are fooling with that little bit of trickery, but the victory is a hollow one for sure.

When you start to train as a long distance runner, one of the things you learn early on, is how to conserve energy. You recognise that if you don’t make your energy last till the end of the race, you will not have a happy finish!

You have to carefully calculate the distance you must cover, the time available to cover it in, and therefore the speed you must engage at various parts of the race.

So it is with life and with seasons of life: You must assess the size of the gap between where you are and where you want to go, establish how fast you want to get there, and then carefully figure out how much energy you are going to expend on which pieces of your journey so as to ensure that the energy lasts all the way to the end goal.

Sometimes we forfeit a happy ending because we are bored. And in some cases boredom sets in long before closing time, but we are embarrassed to say we are bored, and too lazy or too cowardly to say anything at all so we let the whole thing fizzle out of steam before we get off the ride.

Apparently for some people, the pain of waiting the whole thing out is somehow more bearable that the pain of facing facts early on. As a person who hates prolonged goodbyes, I find it difficult to understand this phenomenon. Surely one would rather finish than fizzle?

So, if you are a person who has started something — a project, a group, a company or a country — you might want think about how you’ll make your exit a happy one.

Thembe Khumalo is a brand-builder, storyteller and social entrepreneur. Find out more on www.thembekhumalo.com or follow her social media accounts @thembekhumalo