The Purpose of Our Conclusions
Conclusions to Avoid a Battle
By their very nature, conclusions imply that we no longer need to fight for the continuation of something because it’s supposed to be over. If something’s concluded, we can pull up, catch our breath, wipe our brow in relief, and sneak off a battlefield that we hated being on in the first place. Therefore, if we can call something as concluded, we can conclude our need to fight for it. Avoiding a battle of just about any kind is pretty compelling. Therefore, we often take license and determine that something’s concluded because we really don’t want to fight for it in the first place. And we therefore find ourselves calling it good in order to prematurely excuse ourselves from a battle that we really don’t want any part of.
Conclusions as Avoiding Abandonment
Conclusions also give us permission to abandon something under the guise that whatever it is, it’s done. The whole idea of abandonment is rather distasteful for most of us. It implies a rather pathetic cowardice fed by fear that incessantly drives us away from great things and into the shadow of nothing. Far too often fear prevails and cowardice wins the day. But we’ve rather astutely figured out that we can readily side-step the shame of cowardice by saying that something’s done. It’s completed. We convince ourselves that we don’t need to fight for it because there’s nothing left to fight for. By our definition of cowardice, the battle is rightly concluded. And in that decision we have handed ourselves a ready excuse to flee the battlefield in a manner where we look more the victor than the vanquished.
Conclusions as Avoiding Embarrassment
Conclusions free us from having to stand up and fight when everyone else around us has walked away. In a world populated with spineless individuals bent on feeding their own soured appetites, many critical battles have been blatantly abandoned. Battles are by their very nature sacrificial. They demand a commitment to a cause far larger than any individual person fighting the battle. And if perchance the result is victory, those who fought the battle may not have the privilege of ever experiencing the fruits of that victory. Because of those rather sharp realities, many walk away. And with the ranks embarrassingly depleted, we often seem the fool if we stick around. Yet, if we simply call the battle concluded, we free our conscience to walk off the battlefield with the droves that are walking before us. We save face in the embrace of a lie.
Conclusions as Avoiding Failure
Conclusions free us from the potential awkwardness that we might feel in having attempted to save something only to fail miserably in the effort. We can be brave and we can be bold. But neither insulate us from potential failure. Conclusions give us the ability to step away from something before we’ve been in it long enough to fail at it. Despite the fact that it’s not concluded, we often walk through this thing we’re engaged in, picking out a success here and a success there. And in holding those scrapes up we declare that we’ve succeeded and that we can close up shop and go home. Or, we can dumb-down our goals so the task looks completed. Or we can cite the proverbial escapist clause that ‘it’s about as good as it gets’ and then get going. When we do, we feign victory when we’re living defeat.
The Consequence
And because we engage in these behaviors, we bury many things that in reality aren’t dead. Our lives are littered with a host of unnecessary graves that hold things that are still very much alive. We’ve buried opportunity, and we’ve interred hope. We’ve closed down relationships, and we’ve closed out dreams. We’ve nailed fresh ideas in pine boxes, and we’ve entombed possibilities that are now rendered impossible for the single and sole reason that we buried them alive. It is phenomenally tragic that we errantly label something as concluded when the only thing that’s concluded is the fact that it’s begun.
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