When Will This End?

There’s a question that has stayed with me.

When will this end?

It came up in a private conversation with a Jewish friend and colleague who was carrying the weight of accumulated loss and the exhaustion of witnessing human suffering repeat itself. 

October 7th was the catalyst for our conversation, but what she was grappling with reached both deeply into and far beyond one date, gently touching the broader, recurring reality of human cruelty and loss across the world.

At the time, I remember wanting to help. Wanting to steady the space. Wanting, if I’m honest, to offer something like reassurance.

I also wanted to believe — and wanted her to believe — that regardless of the form devastation takes, there is always a pathway back to meaning. That somehow, someday, it would end. That the cruel, senseless harm humans could be capable of would stop. That none of this would be for nothing.

That belief felt supportive then. Now, looking back, I can see it for what it also was: protective.

It was a belief that for so long has allowed my nervous system to keep choosing love in a world that repeatedly violates it. A kind of scaffolding if you like. Not naïve, at least not through a lens of ignorance afforded through privilege, but developmental. Something I have needed to draw upon as an anchor at points in my own life, so as to find the courage to keep going.

What I didn’t understand then, and have come to understand since, is that the question “when will this end?” doesn’t always want an answer.

Sometimes it’s grief speaking out loud.
Sometimes it’s exhaustion.
And sometimes it marks the edge of a transition, one where the stories we’ve relied on no longer quite hold, and the next ones haven’t yet taken shape.

That question all those months ago has followed me since.

This past week, after the massacre in Bondi and the heavy aftershocks that ripple through communities, it surfaced again. I’ve been quiet. Not absent, but reflective. Reaching out privately, and sitting in conversations with friends who are Jewish. Listening. Witnessing the way people simultaneously carry grief while also bracing for what often comes next: simplification, polarisation, and the pressure to declare which pain counts, and who for.

I’ve found myself holding that question again,  'when will this end? ', and noticing that I don’t have an answer.

And maybe none of us do.

There is a psychological threshold here that many of us encounter if we keep living with our hearts open. The movement from ‘when will this end?’ to ‘maybe it doesn’t.’

I wonder if it’s one of the hardest transitions a human can make without tipping into cynicism or numbness.

A lot of people cope by collapsing into binaries . The good guys and bad guys, right side and wrong side. It can feel stabilising, like giving the mind somewhere firm to stand when everything else is moving.

But binaries come at a cost.

That cost shows up in the way grief gets ranked.
 

In the way pain becomes comparative.
In the way people are asked — explicitly or subtly — to make their suffering quieter so someone else’s can be heard. And in the way conversations start to orbit around who is allowed to be devastated, and who must swallow it.

I don’t understand that framework. To be honest, I never have, and I don’t want any part of it.

What I keep coming back to in my own sense-making is something I’ve carried for years - the distinction between necessary suffering and unnecessary suffering.

There is necessary suffering in life. Loss. Death. Grief. The pain that comes with loving deeply in a world that cannot be controlled. That kind of suffering is not a failure of meaningful living. It is a necessary part of being alive.

What I’ve always wanted to work against, both in myself and in the worlds I touch, is unnecessary suffering: the worry wells, the spirals, the misery we add on top of pain through fear, judgment, dehumanisation, and the small violences we excuse because they’re common.

Recently, I learned of metastability, of how even the human brain doesn’t stay healthy in perfect synchrony. Too much rigid order makes us physically unwell. Health lives closer to the edge, where there’s enough stability to function, and enough movement to adapt.

Maybe meaning is like that too.

Maybe we aren’t meant to eradicate uncertainty. Maybe the work is learning how to live alongside it, without abandoning love.

What I do know is this: love cannot be broken in the way violence hopes it can be. Even when it appears destroyed, it recycles itself , through friendship, faith, memory, quiet solidarity, and the choice to remain human when it would be easier to harden.

A close friend said something to me this week that stopped me. These are her words, and I share them with care:

“The loudest voices haven’t been ours up until now. As a community, we need to band together. I hope that more people can recognise now that corridor conversations and comments that reinforce old stereotypes, do nothing but harm and divide.”

I wrote it down immediately, not because it sounded right, but because it felt true.
Something I could hold onto as an anchor of what it means to live with values aligned action. 

It reminded me that impact isn’t only found in what we say publicly. It lives in the background moments too. In the conversations we interrupt. In the assumptions we refuse to pass on. In the restraint we practise when it would be easier to harden or dismiss.

So this is where I land, for now.

Not with answers.
Not with certainty.
But with a stance.

I stand for peace.
I stand against dehumanisation, in every direction.
I stand for a love that does not require predictability to survive.

I don’t know when this ends. I’m no longer trying to pretend that I do.

But I am still here. And you are too. Still learning. Still choosing love, and not as a sentiment, but as the thing that keeps us human at the edge of chaos.