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Reflection on endings

4/15/2025

As I post this blog I’m just back from a two-week stay in Europe. To meet my usual posting date, I decided a month ago to get the blog written ahead of time, ready to post when I got back. It was going to be on the wisdom we can gain through endings. I got right down to work on a first draft.
   Well, so much for that. It faltered miserably.
   So here comes one written in just a couple of days while still on holiday … the quick and dirty (oh, I hope not) story of ending.
   That first draft had been about the power of looking back on what one had been embedded in but was now extricated from to see it through different eyes. But then for the re-writing, I did a re-think. Rather than describing what I’d been embedded in, why not write about how I changed coming out of having been embedded?
   So, to get the hang of this I’ll share a couple of examples from years ago. Then I’ll finish the blog with a little more about our European river cruise.
   I grew up in a constrictive religious environment. A prominent feature of the gospel church culture was that people were sorted into two groups. There were the sinners and there were the saved. A person could go from the sinner to the saved category. After all, that’s what evangelism is all about. The theological handwringings about moving in the reverse direction were still largely unresolved, last I heard.
   Then, I spent most of my adult years in the world of professional psychology. It also came down to two categories. There were those who had disorders (and there were about as many kinds of those as were the many kinds of sins) and then those who were normal. Psychologists were constantly engaged in trying to bring the disordered ones back into the normal category,
   Can you see the similarity?
   I haven’t heard the joke for quite a while but it always started with …psychologists tell us there are two different kinds of people in the world. Perhaps I could end it with … There is the kind of people that divide the world into two different kinds of people and the ones who don’t.
   I’m definitely in the latter category. And I’m definitely railing there against being in a category at all. Whatever. I just can’t be content in divvying up people into mutually exclusive camps.
   So, in getting dis-embedded from these, what have I learned about myself? I learned that I see others as emerging out of, and embodying, dynamic complexity. An essence of human nature is that we constantly shifting and blending and becoming and declining and … Oh, such fun! Way more interesting, so full of potential.
   Emerging out of the religious environment I recognized that the sinners and the saved were not really all that different. While the saved folk didn’t do some fun things, considered them sinful, they still had the flaws of entitlement and arrogance (after all they were God’s chosen people with all the benefits of being so and were the only ones with the correct religious belief). Coming out, I can strive not to be arrogant nor entitled.
   In the psychology world we constantly tried to be objective about things. We kept turning human existence into numbers so it could be counted and run through mathematics. The math then told us about what was normal and what was disorder. We totally forgot that all of us, psychologists included, live our lives immersed in our own subjectivity, our unique melange of thoughts and feelings. We too are … no, let me say it personally … I, too, am experiencing and interacting as the expression of my dynamic complexity.
   Whew, what a relief!

So now about the cruise. When we left Canada we were embedded in politics, in the midst of a federal election. Over the last few months Trump has been playing his international game of chicken with tariffs and his desire to take over Canada. Heading out I expected that most of the other guests on the river cruise ship would be from (Trump’s) USA. I was a bit apprehensive.
   I didn’t need to be. For much of the cruise no one really wanted to bring it up. Occasionally, upon hearing we were Canadian, there were instant apologies. When the topic came up our American neighbours took on sad and disbelieving faces, exuded a sense of powerlessness, disorientation and fear. We held much in common with these folk, after all they were interested in learning about a different countries like we were. Amazingly, they knew very little about Canada other than it was a pretty good country, a pretty good, cold, country.
   But river cruising with Viking we became embedded in something else. History! During our guided tours we learned a mosaic of tidbits from a millennium of history, centuries of it visible in front of us. We learned of the ebb and flow of many peoples over the same land each with their unique cultures, their unique sense of nationhood.
   Through this experience I realize that I’ve inherited a very shallow view of history living in North America. In North America we think in terms of decades rather than centuries if we think history at all. Our view of history has been very ethnocentrically constricted.
   Our North American narrow view of history doesn’t serve us well in our present situation in Canada. The politics we are experiencing, so absolutely sad and frightening as it is, has happened before in other times and places. We heard hundreds of years of it while walking the old cities of the Danube. There were hatreds and carnage and destructiveness along the way, but those were not the end points. New cultural and ethnic identities emerged and took hold. There exists within our collective human nature the capacity to right itself and grow into a new direction.
   And in me too, I hope.

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