Closure?

How does one seek closure in things that scantly offer it?

It often seems that my life is a series of open ended events, sentences that paused mid-word and never completed themselves.  I guess in some sense this is my own fault - I tend to move between ideas and interests like a hummingbird moves from flower to flower - but not everything is under my own control.

I remember - oh, it's been 30 years or more - when I heard the idea of closure, that to fully move through an event one had to have closure.  Closure, interestingly enough, is never really defined except for significant events - death, for example, seems to have a series of well defined steps.  For everything else, there seems to be less definition.  Closure becomes that thing which we should have but seldom seem to.

Is it a flaw in my own character?  I am an intellectual pack rat, always seeking to cling to things and interests, perhaps far longer than I should.  I tend to add things to my list but seldom if ever let anything "go" - it's more as if things go into abeyance for a period (perhaps forever).  To let go of something, for me, is akin to that thing dying - or at least my sense of it dying.

But do such things even offer closure?

That's the second part of the question, the unanswered chorus to the verse.  Perhaps it's not that I cannot find closure as much as many things simply do not offer a formal closure.  They simply are.  They're often morally neutral and truth be told, are merely things, not relationships.  It's not as if an interest in something necessitates a lifelong relationship with it and a grieving process when it is gone.

Perhaps (once again) I am overemphasizing a thing which in fact should be a simple aspect of my life.  Things come, things go.  Even people come and go (even though with social networking many of them seem to come back as well).  Certainly I've never grieved over the loss of a job: it was something that I did for a time, that I then came to decide I was done with and moved on.  Sure, one may miss the people and the inside jokes and even the coffee but there's no sense of emptiness - there's really no need for one.  It's simply a job, something I do.

One has to empty the bucket, of course:  at some point there are things that we cling to that simply no longer fit our life or are times.  And certainly there are things we still need to cling to after years, things that root and ground us (and are occasionally useful) in the the midst of lives which too often take us places we never expected to go.

But events are events and interests are interests.  Perhaps the simple acknowledgement of what they are, that we enjoyed them but that it's time to move on, is closure enough.