Write Your Ending

We have all struggled, gone through tough times, lived through horrible working situations with no end in sight. 

February 02, 2021

Being part of a successful rock ‘n’ roll band is never easy. Just ask Joe Walsh, the lead guitarist of the Eagles. Walsh was a member when the band achieved monumental acclaim, stringing records together, reaching the sixth-most successful album of all time. But as their success grew, so did their internal problems. Looking back on that time, Walsh said:

“You know, there’s a philosopher who says, ‘As you live your life, it appears to be anarchy and chaos, and random events, non-related events, smashing into each other and causing this situation or that situation, and then, this happens, and it’s overwhelming, and it just looks like what in the world is going on? And later, when you look back at it, it looks like a finely crafted novel. But at the time, it doesn’t.”

It’s unclear what philosopher Walsh was referring to or if his words are even a direct quote, but there’s a profound concept here for all of us. We have all struggled, gone through tough times, lived through horrible working situations with no end in sight. We often would wonder when this overwhelmingly bad experience would end. Then, a few years later, upon looking back, we believe the discomfort, the hardships, the volatility of the time, served us well. The story was hard to live through without knowing the ending. But once we saw it, we became stronger, better off from the experience.

We are not living a life from a finely crafted novel. Ours has uncertainty, unexpected highs and plenty of lows. But we must believe we can control our ending with perseverance, relentless passion and an unwillingness to allow a bump in the road to become our obstacle.

John Irving, the great novelist, always writes the last line of his book before he begins. He knows the ending, then tells the story. We might be wise to copy that approach. It will allow us to not overemphasize the hardships and chaos that occur.

Let’s know that we have a finely-crafted ending that we, ourselves, control.

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