Oh I love happy endings. Who doesn’t? They are nice and sweet, leave you with the fuzzy warm feeling inside. They make you oh-so-hopeful. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it. But its representation as the final and fatal is likely to be less than sweet at times.
The one thing straight forwardly wrong with the happy ending representation is how it overshadows the entire process, the journey. In an on going universe nothing truly is final. It’s a journey.
Happy ending is an outcome, of actions we take. But how often do actions know where they are headed to?
This representation of happy endings as the all-end-goals have us seeking for resolutions in the most desperate of situation, and we’d get sad when the ending isn’t pretty neat before the credits roll. Of course we’d be sad, we have projected a piece of ourselves into the character on screen, or on the page. Loose ends pinch us, because we have a lot of loose ends all over ourselves.
Over focused happy endings take the charm away from the entire process, tying our actions to an ultimate outcome which is supposed to be ‘happy’ and an ‘end’. But think of a time when you couldn’t take the next step itself. How would you imagine the end, no matter how happy? You’re in between moments, soaking in time. Maybe there’s no need to tie the ends sometimes, maybe they cannot be tied at times.
We’re here in between, in the middle of a nasty process of trying, failing, learning, leaving, moving, grieving, overcoming; in between transitions waiting to take the next step. Maybe we already have, maybe we haven’t. It isn’t in the end.
The Wordcastle 