Tantric: When Is Prolonging the Journey the Point?

How long do you let something tease you before you accept that it isn't going to put out?

3 September 2026

• 3032 words • 18 min read

I used to run five kilometres several times a week. Nothing heroic. I wasn't training for a marathon or trying to discover what lay beyond the outer limits of human endurance. I liked running five kilometres because, once I'd finished, I'd run five kilometres.

There were other benefits.

I liked being fit. I liked the way regular running made my body look. I liked putting my hair up, pulling on my running tights, sports bra and T-shirt, sorting out my earphones, strapping my phone to my arm, lacing up my trainers and heading over to the trail looking convincingly like someone who enjoyed exercise.

Then I'd start running.

And for the first kilometre I'd remember that I fucking hated running.

My breathing was wrong. My legs were wrong. The distance ahead was preposterous. Somewhere around the point at which turning around would have been both physically easy and philosophically defensible, I'd begin wondering whose bloody idea this had been.

But I knew something my body didn't yet know.

The first kilometre was a liar.

Keep going and eventually something changed. My breathing found its rhythm. My legs stopped submitting formal complaints. The trail opened in front of me, there was air on my face, music in my ears, and suddenly I was inside the reason I'd come.

The first kilometre hadn't been telling me to stop.

It had merely been the first kilometre.

This is an extremely useful thing to know about running.

It is a much less reliable thing to assume about life.

We are awash with stories about people who refused to give up. They trained through the pain, survived the auditions, sent the manuscript out for the hundredth time, mortgaged the house, ignored the doubters and eventually emerged holding a medal, an Oscar or an oversized cheque.

We don't make nearly as much inspirational merchandise for the person who looked at the available evidence and said:

Actually, fuck this.

And yet I've begun to wonder whether knowing when to stop requires at least as much wisdom as knowing when to continue.

Recently, someone I know told me he would never give up on something he has been pursuing for more than seven years.

During the years I've known him, that pursuit has repeatedly left him broke. Properly broke. At one point he lost the roof over his head and lived in a tent with his children. He's driven on bald tyres because he couldn't afford to replace them. Currently his car isn't registered.

He remains certain that success is coming.

When I pointed out that he was describing the sunk-cost fallacy almost word for word, he surprised me by agreeing.

The sunk-cost fallacy is our tendency to continue investing in something because of what we've already invested in it.

Money.

Time.

Effort.

Love.

Years.

The investment is gone either way. But stopping can make us feel as though we're throwing away everything we've already put in.

I've sacrificed so much that I can't stop now.

He knew exactly what I meant.

Then he told me the story of being three feet from gold.

In the story, a man gives up digging for gold and sells his equipment. Somebody else continues digging and discovers that the first man had stopped just three feet short of a fortune.

The moral is obvious.

Don't stop.

“So...?” I said.

“So, keep going,” he replied.

“For the love of God.”

There is, of course, a rather important problem with being three feet from gold.

You don't know you're three feet from gold.

You might be three feet away.

You might be three hundred feet away.

There might not be any fucking gold.

And once you've decided that the absence of gold is evidence that you need to keep digging, you've created a philosophy that can sustain itself indefinitely.

One year without gold proves nothing.

Seven years without gold proves nothing.

Fifteen years without gold proves nothing.

Perhaps you're closer than ever.

Perhaps tomorrow.

Perhaps one more hole.

And this is where my five-kilometre run becomes inconvenient, because sometimes that philosophy is absolutely right.

If I'd stopped every time the first kilometre told me running was a terrible idea, I would have missed everything I loved about running.

The discomfort was real.

It just wasn't information.

Or rather, it wasn't the information I might have mistaken it for.

It didn't mean stop.

It meant you're at kilometre one.

So perhaps the question isn't whether we should be people who persevere or people who know when to quit.

Perhaps the question is much harder.

How do you tell the difference between kilometre one and year seven?

Because I've done both.

I've kept going when things were hard.

And I've cried while getting on a plane because I knew it was time to leave something I desperately wanted.

Years ago, after the airline I'd been working for, Air Europe, went bust, I went to Antigua to work for another one. It was called Antigua and Barbuda International Airways.

The airline never actually got off the ground. None of us was paid a cent, although we were given accommodation, and somehow I found myself living in the Caribbean with friends, sunshine, endless water skiing and no discernible reason to want to be anywhere else.

To me, this was utopia.

Not everyone shared my interpretation of events.

Eventually tickets were arranged to send us back to London. Almost everybody went.

My friend Vicki and I had fallen in love with Antigua.

And fortunately, Pan Am had broken our luggage.

Our bags had been taken away for repair and wouldn't be back for another week.

We explained that obviously we couldn't possibly fly home without them.

This bought us a week.

What we neglected to mention was that we could almost certainly have had the bags back sooner if we'd shown the slightest enthusiasm for retrieving them.

We did not.

We spent that week walking ourselves footsore, knocking on the doors of hotels and resorts, looking for work.

And maddeningly, they wanted us.

But visa rules required them to employ local workers.

Wanting us wasn't enough.

Wanting Antigua wasn't enough.

And meanwhile our week was running out.

If we weren't on the plane at the end of it, getting home became our problem.

We didn't have the money to buy another ticket.

So eventually we got on the plane.

And as it took off, I cried.

I still occasionally grieve that time.

But I've never thought:

We should have tried harder.

We had tried.

Sometimes the road ahead is difficult.

Sometimes you reach the point where you can no longer afford to keep looking for a way through.

They are not the same thing.

The difficulty is that things don't necessarily stop mattering when they end.

I recently ended a friendship of nearly forty years. For most of my adult life I'd called him my best friend. Eventually he'd become family.

But somewhere along the way, those descriptions had quietly become instructions.

He's my best friend. He's family. You don't walk away from family.

Except the friendship those words described was no longer the friendship I was actually experiencing. I had the peculiar sensation of standing under an umbrella marked BEST FRIEND and discovering I was still getting wet.

So eventually I put the umbrella down.

Months later, travelling in Vietnam, I thought about him often. I'd see something and hear the old him in my ear, still perfectly capable of making me smile.

And I realised something that should probably have been obvious.

Missing something is not the same as wanting it back.

Nor does grieving an ending prove the ending was wrong.

We have an odd tendency to demand that our decisions rewrite the past for us. If a marriage ends, perhaps it was a mistake. If a career ends badly, perhaps we chose the wrong career. If a friendship stops working, perhaps it was never a real friendship.

I don't believe that.

Things are allowed to have been wonderful and be over.

Not everything has to justify itself by ending well.

People are allowed to have been right for us and not be right for us now.

A road can take us somewhere extraordinary without acquiring a lifelong contractual obligation to remain on it.

Perhaps that's why the sunk-cost fallacy has never held much emotional power over me.

The past doesn't need redeeming.

It already happened.

I once left an abusive marriage.

For a long time I stayed partly because there was a small boy in the middle of it who was happy. My son adored his family. He could play on the swings, look up and see both his mother and father there, and assume that this was simply how the world worked.

Who was I to break that?

So I stayed.

By then, however, unhappiness had become the climate of the marriage.

One afternoon my husband announced that some people from church were coming to our house to discuss “a Christian perspective on the election results.”

My husband was a Christian. I wasn't. He also knew I was deeply unhappy and that home had become somewhere I desperately needed to retreat from the world.

Nevertheless, he invited them.

I could participate in a conversation framed by beliefs I didn't share, hide elsewhere in my own house, or leave until they were gone.

Except I didn't want to bloody well leave my own house.

And whichever option I chose, I looked like the arsehole.

Not because of one lunch. But because this was the marriage in miniature.

On its own, a Christian discussion about election results is hardly grounds for divorce.

That was precisely the point.

It reminds me of the enormous Mr Creosote in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, who consumes an obscene quantity of food before finally accepting one wafer-thin mint.

The mint isn't the problem.

The preceding banquet is the problem.

The Christian luncheon was a mint.

Not long afterwards, I remember lying on our bed, miserable almost beyond language. My husband came in, lay down behind me and put his arms around me.

“Calm down,” he said. “You know we're going to grow old together.”

And something in me said:

No.

No, we're not.

On no planet can I see us growing old together.

I didn't leave that afternoon.

Knowing and acting are neighbours, but they don't always share a driveway.

Eventually I woke up one morning and thought:

That's it. I can't do this anymore.

Leaving did not make life immediately easier.

It unleashed years of hell.

During those years I had an image I returned to again and again.

A trapeze.

Leaving the marriage had got me onto it.

Freedom was the platform on the other side.

For years after I left, my ex-husband could still reach into my life through property, custody and the Family Court.

Another punch in the stomach.

Hold on.

Another attempt to make me cave in.

Hold on.

Every time I thought I was free, there seemed to be another way to poke me on my trapeze.

Still:

Hold on.

So I did.

Not because holding on was inherently noble.

I knew what I was holding on for.

Eventually my son was nearly seventeen. I had my own home. I lived a long way from my ex-husband. My son was old enough to make his own decisions.

There was nowhere left for the hand to reach me from.

I had reached the platform.

Freedom.

We're taught to admire the person who hangs on.

We rarely ask whether the thing they're hanging on to still deserves the effort.

There is a difference between swinging towards a platform and simply getting very good at hanging.

And yet I don't particularly admire quitting.

That's the problem.

I admire tenacity enormously.

Right now, in fact, I'm in hospital facing a recovery I would very much prefer not to be facing, and I have no interest whatsoever in discovering a philosophical justification for giving up because the first part is hard.

Sometimes the only way out really is through.

But surely persistence has to be in service of something other than persistence.

Something has to answer back.

Progress.

Pleasure.

Meaning.

Money.

Connection.

Possibility.

A reason to believe that the thing you're enduring is taking you somewhere.

It doesn't have to reward you immediately. My first kilometre never did.

But at some point, surely, the road has to give you something other than another mile of road.

Which brings me back to the man who believes he is three feet from gold.

He believes he has developed a trading system capable of making extraordinary amounts of money. He watches the markets and sees trades that, had he taken them, would have made money.

But fear stops him pressing the button.

So the evidence he sees is peculiar.

There.

That one.

I would have made money there.

And that one.

See?

Tomorrow I'll press the button.

And tomorrow becomes another day of watching.

“I will succeed,” he told me. “You can't see what I can see.”

And perhaps he's right.

That's the irritating bit.

Perhaps tomorrow he'll strike gold.

Perhaps next year I'll be forced to sit through the world's most unbearable I told you so, delivered from the passenger seat of a Lamborghini.

I hope it's comfortable.

But there is no way for either of us to know.

There is no Alternative Life Department where we can submit our major decisions and receive a comparative report.

ALISON'S ALTERNATIVE LIFE REPORT

Stayed in England: 7/10. Better career. Disappointing kitchen.

Stayed married: 3/10. Do not recommend.

Continued guitar lessons: Surprisingly accomplished blues guitarist.

I would particularly like that last report.

I gave up guitar as a child because I couldn't play F-sharp.

I tried.

I practised.

Thunk.

Thunk.

Thunk.

Eventually I gave up.

I occasionally regret it. I'd quite like to be able to play guitar now.

But I can't turn that regret into an accusation against the little girl who stopped.

She was doing the best she could with what she had at the time.

I don't require the woman I was twenty years ago to have known what I know now.

And I don't require the woman who stayed in an abusive marriage to have left before she believed she could survive what leaving would require.

The trouble with worshipping persistence is that it treats time as though it were infinitely renewable.

It isn't.

Every year given to one thing is a year unavailable to something else.

Sunk cost asks us to keep going because of everything we've already given.

Three feet from gold asks us to keep going because of everything we might be about to receive.

Opportunity cost asks a less seductive question.

What is continuing to cost us now?

The man I mentioned earlier once told me that ordinary work would be a waste of his limited time on this planet.

I understood what he meant.

I just couldn't understand why sitting in front of a screen every day for more than seven years, repeatedly broke, somehow didn't qualify.

From where I stood, his life had become narrower.

There were things he was naturally good at that he wasn't doing.

Places he wasn't going.

Experiences he couldn't afford.

Relationships from which his pursuit took time and attention.

Practical pieces of life deteriorated around him while he remained focused on the future moment when all of this would finally have been worth it.

But that's the genius of almost.

Almost is hope with its clothes off.

Almost doesn't ask you to abandon today for nothing.

It asks you to exchange today for tomorrow.

Tomorrow is where the money is.

Tomorrow is where the breakthrough happens.

Tomorrow is where everybody who doubted you discovers that you were right.

Tomorrow redeems the tent.

Tomorrow pays for the tyres.

Tomorrow explains the seven years.

Except eventually tomorrow has to become today.

Otherwise you're not pursuing a future.

You're postponing one.

Which may be why I'm suspicious of another seductive idea:

If I stop now, everything I've already put into this will have been wasted.

No.

Stopping doesn't travel backwards through time.

It can't.

An ending doesn't erase what came before it.

The years happened.

The marriage happened.

The friendship happened.

Antigua happened.

The run happened.

Whatever they gave me is still mine.

Perhaps that's where we get ourselves into trouble.

We confuse continuing with validating.

As though the only way to prove a choice was worthwhile is to keep choosing it.

Forever.

But permanence is a strange standard for value.

We don't judge dinner that way.

Nobody leaves a wonderful restaurant saying:

“Absolutely magnificent, but unfortunately it ended at 10.45, so in retrospect I can't recommend it.”

Some things are supposed to end.

Others simply do.

And some need us to notice that they already have.

Maybe the real question isn't whether you're tough enough to keep going.

Maybe it's whether you can look at something you've loved, worked for, sacrificed for, believed in, perhaps even built part of your identity around, and ask it one brutally unromantic question:

What are you giving me now?

Not what did you give me?

Not what might you give me if the gold is three feet away?

Not what will everybody think if I stop?

Now.

Because there is a difference between pushing through the first kilometre and spending seven years waiting for the second one to begin.

And perhaps the only person who can know when you've crossed that line is you.

Which is inconvenient.

There will be no official sign.

No wise elder stationed beside the road with a clipboard.

No Alternative Life Department sending through the comparative figures.

No spreadsheet with a cell helpfully turning green when perseverance becomes futility.

Nobody slipping a handwritten note under your pillow saying THAT'S ENOUGH NOW.

Sometimes the only signpost will come from somewhere inside you:

It's time to stop now.

And perhaps your entire contribution to the conversation will be:

Oh. Okay.

And then you turn.

Or stay.

Or get on the plane crying.

Or put down the umbrella.

Or finally accept that whatever has been teasing you for seven years...

really ought to have put out by now.