Delphic Maxim 147: On reaching the end, be without sorrow
I set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day. This is the final post.
147. On reaching the end be without sorrow
On the twenty-first of January this year — 2019 — I sat down to write a response to one of the Delphic Maxims. My plan was to write for fifteen minutes each day, whatever it was that came to my head, totally unprepared, just riffing on the ideas and letting them flow. The plan was for me to get back in the habit of writing regularly. I wanted to see what could be done in fifteen minute chunks, for five days a week.
Here we are, at maxim number 147, the very end, and I’m happily ending it without sorrow.
That first maxim asked us to ‘follow God’, and for me the challenge was to translate that kind of spiritual message into both a contemporary context, but a secular one. And to do that as someone who considers himself an atheist. To do that, I talked about faith and virtue. But I suppose there’s a spiritual story beneath that for everybody as well. That’s one of the themes that seems to recur across this whole project: life is more than crude matter, whether we understand that as our social selves, or something more.
A story that always stuck with me was something my grandfather’s sister said as she was getting near the end of her time. She was very old, in her 90’s, and she said “I’ve seen my brothers and sisters go before me, I’ve seen enough throughout my life, I’m ready to go”. It wasn’t so melancholy — she was one of the happiest and kindest people I’ve met (the whole family is, to be honest). But it’s a beautiful way to think about life: that at the end you feel like you’ve had your fill.
Endings can be bitter-sweet, and they can be sad, and in maxims we’ve heard about grief and grieving. And I don’t think this final maxim denies that that’s sometimes part of the process. But sorrow? Sorrow I think carries this note of regret, or the misery and mournfulness that forgets about the joy of what ended.
The idea of faith is fairly significant when it comes to dealing with reaching the end, which is why I think it’s interesting that this project is book-ended by it. For some, the end of life on earth is the beginning of an afterlife — maybe in heaven, maybe in nirvana, maybe in Elysium. For others, they might roll on into a reincarnated life here on earth. And for others again, our conscious life might end, but our life as matter and energy goes on ceaselessly, borne out into time’s tide across the universe — atoms and molecules and photons and quarks — taking on forms we can’t possibly imagine.
So there isn’t really reason to be sorrowful if we’ve reached the end. The end, regardless of your spiritual position, is the start of something new. That’s the physics of it. The end clears space for whatever comes next.
Let me give you a less grand example — something that you can consider without the added gravity of loss: I love when a TV show that I love gets cancelled. Especially if they’re given time to end it properly. It’s nice to see a conclusion. It’s especially nice because I know that my mind can finally flick to something new. It’s also nice to be able to look back and reflect on the journey — maybe to take a few lessons from it, maybe write a little bit about it, maybe turn those thoughts and notes and ideas into something new. Our creativity is all about iteration and adaptation. Our imagination is the blasted remains of a previous idea, smelted down and hammered into something new. It’s only by ending one thing that we can turn it into something else.
So what’s done is done. A hundred and forty seven maxims — who knows what form these will take next. Have I learned something? Yes. I learned that you can write a lot — over 87,000 words in fact — by writing for just 15 minutes a day. And I learned that it’s hard to think of things on the spot, preparation and reading make for better writing.
Now to see what comes next.
The end.
