Moments That End Softly: What I’ve Learned from Watching the Sea

The sea doesn’t always roar — sometimes it simply recedes into the light.

Some endings crash like the waves in a storm against the rocky shoreline, whilst others drift in with the tide and vanish before you notice they were ever there.

In all the years I’ve spent watching the sea, whether I chose to be there deliberately, or because I simply found myself near it, it’s taught me something about both kinds. The crashing waves are certainly more dramatic and because of their more violent tendencies, they are almost impossible to ignore, but it's the soft endings, those that dissipate slowly, that seem to stay with me longer. They leave behind a kind of gentle closure, one that doesn’t demand anything more of me, but instead, offers a quiet kind of peace.

I'm sure that I'm not alone in this, but I used to think that all of life’s chapters would always end with some clarity. You know the sort of thing I mean; a conclusive conversation, a decisive moment, a definitive event that marked the end of something and said, "This is over".

But my time watching the sea has slowly undone that belief and it has taught me that some things end without exclamation marks as the final punctuation mark, without the big event and without the drama. Like the feelings between two people that have drifted apart over time, until they are simply existing in close proximity. They simply fade away, like the tide within the harbour that slips away quietly, unnoticed, leaving the small fishing vessels gently beached on the sand. It's not because the feelings they once had for each other weren’t meaningful, it's more because their time passed in silence, in stillness, without the need for ceremony as they drifted apart.

Some endings don’t need to be explained — only quietly witnessed.

I’ve stood alone on empty beaches, the damp sand cool beneath my feet, watching how the light slowly gives itself over to dusk. As the sun fades and the sea softens, there’s no declaration, no announcement that the day is done. Just the hush. And noticing that hush, and I mean really noticing it, is sometimes all the closure we need.

Reflecting on the quiet endings in my own life as far as it has gone, I see it clearly now. How some friendships didn’t break; they just loosened and unraveled until we were no longer a part of each other’s daily rhythm. Whether it was because of a simple misunderstanding (and there have been some) that caused an initial, small but irrecoverable fracture in the relationship, or whether it was something more subtle that crept up unexpectedly, the fact remains that there are those that were once considered as close, that are no longer a feature in my life.

Some seasons of my life didn’t finish with a door slamming shut; they just ebbed away, until one day I suddenly realised they were no longer a part of my normal routine. Don't get me wrong, that’s alright and I'm not fazed by their absence, but it's an important life lesson to understand that not everything ends loudly and not everything has to!

So, in this, the sea has taught me the value of letting go without needing to explain, without the need to justify some of the choices that I have made. It’s shown me how peace often comes not from understanding everything, but from allowing space for what is no longer ours. It also reminds me that silence isn’t necessarily empty and that some of the most profound endings come not with a deafening noise and a tumultuous ending, but with a soft and gentle sigh.

Not everything has to end with a bang. Some things slip away softly, like a breath, like the tide retreating to where it came from.

And those...those are the endings that linger, the ones that leave a profound and lasting effect on our lives.

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Explore more reflections and free wellness resources at Wellness With Ning. This post was originally published on Medium.

Be gentle with yourself today.

– Ning