I’ve been thinking a lot about endings. Why do we hold on, and what’s the cost of not letting go?
We are living through the first great unmooring of the 21st Century. It might be 2026, but the post-war system that has defined stability since 1945 is fracturing. The rules of the game have changed and we are being offered a choice: to be complicit and carry on, in the hope that ‘normal’ will return, or take up the charge to imagine and action something different. To design new pathways and act with agency to come together and hope. But how can you even start to ask questions about what next, when you’re holding on to what was?
I don’t know about you, but right now my brain feels like a swarm of bees. Noisy, unsettled, in disarray and searching for a north star. My head knows that we need space in order to create, but my heart fears the change required.
Professionally, there are so many reasons we avoid endings. Sunk cost fallacy, identity attachment, fear of admitting failure, exhaustion and the belief that it’s easier to keep going than fight to stop, hope that it will all suddenly start working. And maybe because it feels kinder to keep something limping on than to admit it no longer works. But ruinous empathy is not the same as service to a mission.
At the heart I think it’s because we don't have permission or, more importantly, we don’t have rituals for endings. But the cost of not ending things is already being paid. It’s being paid in burnout and stagnation and complicity instead of in deliberate choices.
In the charity sector we have rituals for launching things: strategies, campaigns, programmes, brands. We measure personal and professional progress on the new, the shiny, the launches and the milestones. But we have no rituals for stopping. Or if we do, that process is frequently painful, sometimes accusatory, and (IMHO) not particularly healthy. We view endings through the lens of failure, with blame and with finality. Or (and I personally think this might be worse), we end things and then immediately move on, expecting everyone involved to just let go and get on with what’s next.
We hold no space for grief. So if you were to reimagine this transition, what would it look like to ritualise responsible endings? To gather a team not just to announce closure, but to honour contribution, extract learning, and consciously redistribute what remains?
When a tree falls in the forest, it has a chance of becoming what's called a nurse log. The decaying trunk holds moisture, moderates temperature, and offers a stable surface. New saplings grow directly out of the dead wood. Nothing goes to waste. Decay is not passive; it's a platform for new growth. So what if we treated our endings the same way? Not as destruction, but as composting. What if, instead of burning everything down, we dismantled carefully and asked: what component parts do we keep? What knowledge, relationships, insight can we carry forward into whatever comes next?
Endings will happen with or without us. We can choose how we lead them. To close something well, to honour it and to harvest from what it taught us. To release it without shame and create the pause to recognise the space it once filled. To create new rituals for endings. Because too often we keep things alive not because they serve the mission, but because we fear being associated with their closure. We protect our authorship and our legacy.