Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
The Baleful Head
(c. 1885)
"…confident that these EndDays remain well on their way toward ending."

Endings sometimes seem to take forever to arrive. What might have begun seeming as certain as any fait accompli turns sluggish in process. Progress comes begrudgingly, if at all, and what seemed like a sprint or a routine walk in the park becomes a trudge. Progress might only be imaginary after all, after all initial evidence to the contrary. This campaign will also demand more patience than anticipated. Faith never flags, though energy does. It’s genuinely wearying to require a fresh reason to keep on keeping on every morning, when yesterday’s brilliant reason proved itself inadequate as leftovers. This series necessarily needs ninety good and decent reasons to continue believing that the evil intruding will ultimately have only been temporary, when each fresh intolerable second already seems to have lasted an eternity. What will end this seemingly never-ending ending?

My strategic plan called for engaging to maintain my attention. I hadn’t wanted to doze my way through to resolution. This overwhelming insult was some part opportunity, I’d reasoned, for rarely has any lifetime been lucky enough to be present to witness such a downfall. I carried no more than a thumbnail activity strategy. I would merely chronicle progress or the lack thereof, sprinkling in my personal observations, deliberately including the usual decidedly nonobjective observer in each story. I would fulfill the role of chronicler. What could possibly prove to be easier? As usual, I hadn’t explicitly planned for respite. I’d tacitly presumed that my engagement would naturally prove to be self-reinforcing, rendering unnecessary any need I might otherwise possess to rest. I consequently caught myself dragging myself to engage on recent mornings, obviously exhausted to any halfway observant eye, though merely grumpy to mine.

No transformation can be distantly observed. Such changes tend to also directly affect each would-be observer such that they might typically expect to be transformed themselves. It has always been the nature of transformation that it visits in unanticipatable guises. The brio with which we create our plans always multiplies the shock that observation eventually extends. There was no safe distance from which to watch that history unfolding. Whatever played out ‘out there’, also played out insidiously ‘in here.’ It’s never clear where such experiences will lead any observer, though a sense of deep exhaustion often accompanies these engagements. Even the ever-beating heart requires DiastolicRelief. What might seem like steadily never-ending activity includes an embedded sigh, a counterbalancing bye, continually repeating split-seconds of respite slipping by.

I was shelling peas and a whole pile of fresh fava beans, it being Spring and the time for preparing those seasonal vegetables. They’d arrived just in time, for I hadn’t hardly noticed just how exhausted I’d become, how I’d suddenly managed to be too much in the world to satisfy me. My steadfast dedication to this EndDays series had left me feeling hollow. I felt satisfied with what I’d produced, but also hopeless. The innocence that had carried me through my earliest dispatches had evolved into my usual localized experience. I couldn’t quite as successfully continue pulling some of my unavoidable wool over my eyes. I still believed that our despot’s on his last legs, that our Democracy remains destined to once again find her hind legs, but I’m feeling terribly weary with the sheer slog required to watch this mess resolve. The end seems more endless than imminent, still certain but strangely, frustratingly distant.

The universe created mindless effort to serve as DiastolicRelief here. When focusing upon producing or even just chronicling world-threatening events proves altogether too onerous, as it always eventually most certainly does, then shelling peas successfully draws attention back to something more human-scaled that reliably and immediately means something significant. I sense creamed peas and potatoes in my immediate future, and I utterly reset my sense of success. No man can ever feel like a failure when anticipating receiving a pile of fresh peas creamed with fine potatoes. That supper screams renewal like an April rainfall. It insists that whatever I just went through was well worth it, whatever the effort. It serves as one reliable reward even when, maybe especially when, an end seems to have been terminally delayed again. My frustration can return the morning after I successfully shell a pile of peas and find my sanity inside those pods. I will have changed back into an innocent again by the following morning, confident that these EndDays remain well on their way toward ending.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz