This is my last Odyssey article. After 19 months, 76 articles, hundreds of shares, and thousands of words, this is it.
I didn’t want my final article to be sentimental. I have read other swan song articles and always found them a bit out of place. They feel cliché. It seems more professional to simply write the last one just like any other and walk away.
But tying another quotidian knot in the string and terminating the project lacks poetry. Perhaps it is unprofessional, but I am compelled to try to tie a bow out of the little string I have left in my Odyssey career.
Endings are tricky, but critical. Some are perfect – fairy tales for example – but perfect endings do grace us in reality every so often. Take Jerome Bettis’ ending. For years, he was considered one of the best running backs in football, but he lacked the crown jewel: a Vince Lombardi trophy. In his final season, he and the Pittsburgh Steelers won Super Bowl 40 in Detroit – his hometown. He gave his retirement speech on the midfield stage and rode off into the sunset.
Despite our craving, we often cannot control endings. The opposite of Bettis’ story is just as common. Butler men’s basketball is a quintessential example. The team lost in the NCAA final in 2010. In the 2011 tournament, they were an 8 seed and heavy underdog. Against all odds, they made it back to the final. The storybook ending for Butler’s seniors would be to finally summit the top of college basketball. They lost.
Life is deceptively uncontrollable. The margins in life are razor thin. Inches define outcomes, sentences define leaders, dimes shape legacies. So little is actually controlled by single individuals and so much is left to everyone else.
This is the final thought in the 11-time Tony winning musical Hamilton. The final line, “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story” weakens the audience. There is so little we can control. Endings mean we leave a part of ourselves – our memory, history, and accomplishments – to others.
Ronald Reagan, former US president, took a different approach to endings. In his farewell address to the nation, he focused on what the country had accomplished. Yes, he was leaving his legacy to the skeptics of history, but as he closed his presidency chapter, he urged us all to consider what we have accomplished as we close our own chapters throughout our lives.
Despite our accomplishments, C. S. Lewis famously said, “there are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.” Lewis was speaking on a spiritual level, but on an earthly level, that might not be true. As we flip pages on our experiences, there is no guarantee the future will be better. We might forever revel in the days we are leaving behind.
I presume I will often reflect back on my time at Odyssey. I might never write for a media outlet again; I might return to my words here over and over. The Great Gatsby ends this way: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Maybe endings are cyclical. Like a revolving door, they endlessly open into familiar, yet changed experiences.
Revolving doors don’t go anywhere, though. Endings are dynamic. They are progressive. They are inexplicably hopeful.
As Lewis ends his famous Narnia book series, his beloved characters are travelling “further up and further in.” The end of Narnia is the beginning of a journey – a wonderful journey “in which every chapter is better than the one before.”
To Lewis, endings are sometimes bitter, sometimes like fairy tales. We must commit our story into the hands of another – this is the only way our story flourishes. Endings are cyclical; they are also beginnings; the paradox of life is strongest in times of transition.
I’m torn as I feebly type my final words for Odyssey. I’m proud of the influence of my work, but I’m sorry to see it end and slightly scared to where it will follow me. But, as we all must, I’m clinging to the promise that, even if not always true this side of heaven, gives me hope to move on: there are far better things ahead.
