Many of the people who come on our Laughingheart retreats aren’t looking to change something, they’re looking to transition. And I believe what really distinguishes transition from change is the ending.
People say they want the big life transition, but most of the time, they’re really just looking to shift their external circumstances while clinging to what they already have. They stay in jobs they’ve outgrown while applying for new ones. They remain in relationships that no longer work while quietly hoping for something better. They know they are not living the truest version of their life but are too afraid to let go of what they have….so they change…
And the change they make will seem different.. for a while.
But then it will feel the same again…because they brought themselves, untransformed on the ride 🙃
A transition into something new is fundamentally different.
It involves a conscious ending. And endings are never comfortable.
They involve risks.
They are uncertain.
They are messy.
But the truth that emerges on the other side of an ending is fundamentally different.
A genuine shift.
Transformation.
No going back.
One of the things I love about Greece is the richness of the language. In Greek, the word for ending – telos – literally means completion, fulfillment, purpose achieved. It’s closely related to telia, which means perfect, complete, fully realized.
An ending becomes telia, perfect, when you’ve extracted it’s full meaning, when nothing is left unsaid or undone.
When I reflect on my own midlife transition from the corporate world to my retreat, island life — I can see how at first I was resisting the ending.
I rehearsed for weeks about my resignation. I agreed to lead a start-up in Sydney because I was too afraid of having the status of a nobody if I did what I had really wanted at the time…which was to travel the world and do nothing.
And even when I left the start-up and embraced my next chapter, it took a while for me to stop justifying myself. “What are you doing now?” always came with the answer “I used to be an executive in the advertising world…”
Only when I could finally accept & embrace the ending of my old life and enter the unbelievable discomfort of the complete unknown did all the new and exciting possibilities emerge.
As my friend Ray Martin said in his book, Life without a tie, “What makes the midlife transition unlike any other is that it requires the death of who you have been”
So if you’ve had that niggling feeling, the one that says you’ve outgrown the life you are are currently living..and you’ve probably known this for a while. Then get present to facing the uncomfortable ending that is required.
This is the work of telos, the perfection of the ending.
Not comfortable. Not certain.
But necessary.
Because only when we allow something to truly end, when we stop clinging to the old, can the next chapter have the space to truly emerge and begin 😊
