On endings

When you’ve spent most of your life on an academic calendar, late summer becomes a time of endings. As the calendar ticks down towards August, you start to put your mental accounts in order, tucking away the last dregs of summer sunshine to make way for the chill of autumn and a new school year. Even the weather seems anticipatory – the sky holding its breath in puffy cloud-cheeks ready to overflow with the deluge of a summer thunderstorm. One last hurrah.

In the next few weeks, I’ll be wrapping up my time as a AAAS STPF Fellow and embarking on a full-time career in the water decarbonization space. Not coincidentally, I’ll also be ending my DnD campaign as one of my fellow Fellows – and new friends – heads back home to the west coast.

Endings are always bittersweet. There’s the celebration of accomplishment – look at all the episodes I’ve created, the reports I’ve helped write, the stories I’ve shared! – but also the moreish sensation of wanting to stretch out the experience just a little longer.

In a federal government fellowship, I’ve had to reconcile with the fact that no matter my eagerness, there’s never enough time to accomplish everything I’d like to in just one year. Maybe I’ll never get to see the guidance I’ve helped draft published. Or I won’t get to see the idea that I pitched make it into a funding proposal. I can still walk away knowing that I helped make a difference, and that my office is a little better for the impact I had on it.

Similarly, my home game will always be haunted by the ghosts of paths not taken, of character beats not explored – even if the PCs themselves don’t realize it. As the countdown to the finale approaches, my job as a DM is to take as many of those loose threads as I can and reweave them back into the story of our game. My duty is to reap the final harvest of all those story hooks that I planted nearly a year ago, and that my players have so carefully watered and nurtured. I get to share that bounty with them… and then resow what remains to restart the cycle for the next campaign.

And perhaps that’s the best metaphor for endings: as seeds. We need endings so that we can reflect, reconfigure… and begin anew, wherever the wind might take us.