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

• 4670 words • 28 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 rail 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.

It was always the same. 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 rail 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.

And then came the endorphins, that glorious little chemical reward for having ignored every objection my body had raised a kilometre earlier.

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, slept on somebody's floor 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, I've sacrificed so much that I can't stop now, he surprised me by agreeing.

He knew exactly what I meant.

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

The point of the story is that people often quit just before they succeed.

“So...?” I said.

“So, keep going,” he replied.

“For the love of God.”

There is, of course, a 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?

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

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

More than a hundred of us had been recruited. There had been clues that this might not be an entirely conventional airline. We'd been sent to Rome for airline and safety training with Alitalia, conducted by an instructor who didn't speak English, which meant we were trained in Italian.

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, the people behind the whole fiasco arranged tickets to send us back to London. Nobody had been paid. Nothing had been properly explained. Whatever airline we'd supposedly been recruited to work for had comprehensively failed to materialise.

Almost everybody duly went.

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

And fortunately, Pan Am had broken our luggage.

Our bags had been damaged on the journey out and taken away for repair, leaving us to make do with rubbish bags and whatever else we could find for our things. Pan Am had assured us we'd have the repaired bags back within 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.

A week seemed like an excellent return on a small act of strategic passivity.

We didn't spend it lying on the beach congratulating ourselves. We walked ourselves footsore, knocking on the doors of hotels and resorts, looking for work. Any work. We were trying to find a way to remain on an island we had fallen in love with.

And maddeningly, they wanted us.

Again and again, we found people who would happily have employed us. They liked our experience. They wanted our skills.

But their hands were tied.

The 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.

The people behind the whole fiasco had extended our tickets on one condition: if we weren't on the plane at the end of that week, 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 think about that time with enormous affection. I still occasionally grieve it. Those were halcyon days in a beautiful place and, given the choice we wanted then, we would have stayed.

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.

And perhaps much of a life is spent trying to tell them apart.

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 or experience 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.

I think things are allowed to have been wonderful and be over.

And I think things are allowed to have been difficult, painful, even bloody awful, without that meaning they should never have happened.

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.

This may be 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 was a sunshiny little thing who 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?

It wasn't his fault I wasn't happy.

So I stayed.

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

Not long before one afternoon I remember particularly clearly, my husband announced that some people from church were coming to our house. The purpose of the gathering, he explained with an entirely straight face, was to discuss “a Christian perspective on the election results.”

I thought this was ridiculous.

I still do.

My husband was a Christian. I wasn't. I'd never pretended otherwise. By this point he also knew I was deeply unhappy with the status quo between us. He knew I wasn't particularly social and that, by the weekend, I desperately needed home to be somewhere I could retreat from the world.

Nevertheless, he made the date. He invited them. He chose our home as the venue. Then he carried on merrily with the plan.

It left me three choices.

I could sit with them and participate in a conversation framed by beliefs I didn't share.

I could remain elsewhere in the house while my husband entertained people in our home.

Or I could leave until they were gone.

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

Home was supposed to be my sanctuary.

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

The people coming to our house couldn't see the marriage around the gathering. They couldn't know what had preceded it, or how unhappy I already was, or that their cheerful host knew all of that perfectly well.

From where they sat, he got to be Wonder Husband, warmly welcoming people into his home, while I got to be the Handful. The wife who wouldn't join in. Or hid herself away. Or actually left the house rather than spend time with her husband's friends.

There was nowhere to hide. Literally or figuratively.

And God, it was exhausting.

Not because of one lunch. Not because some Christians wanted to talk about an election. But because this was the marriage in miniature. He could keep trying to fit me into the box he occupied, and when I didn't fit, my refusal to fit became the problem.

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. I was on my side facing the wall, turned away from his side of the bed.

After a while he came in and lay down too. He sidled across 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.

At some point later, I literally 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.

Some of the things I'd feared happened. Others I hadn't thought to fear arrived anyway. The fact that leaving was the right decision did not make its consequences easy.

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.

In between, I swung. Backwards and forwards, up and down, sometimes feeling closer to the other side and sometimes further away. Life went on while I was up there.

The job was to hang on while things happened to me.

Imagine swinging from a trapeze while somebody tickles you under the arms or punches you in the stomach. Every nerve in your body wants to release its grip.

But you can't.

You need to reach the platform.

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

But there were more personal ways too. He could use our son to get to me, returning him whole nights after he was supposed to, telling him things that weren't true, finding ways to hurt me through the person I most wanted protected from all of it.

That was sometimes the worst of it.

It became clear to me that even our child wasn't necessarily beyond use if hurting me was the objective.

And then there was the Family Court. Each new legal action had consequences simply because when a court tells you to turn up, you turn up.

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.

There were times the whole journey made me double over with pain.

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. The Family Court decided there was little point making further orders concerning someone so close to adulthood.

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.

But 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.

I admire people who keep going through the part where everything hurts and nothing seems to be happening. I admire the person who gets through kilometre one.

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.

His position fascinates me because, from inside it, he isn't behaving irrationally at all.

He believes.

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. As I understand it, his system signals those trades each time.

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.

My parents encouraged me to practise with the particular motivational technique known as hassling.

Still no F-sharp.

Eventually I gave up.

I have regretted that occasionally. 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.

Perhaps that's the only way I've ever been able to live without much regret.

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

I don't require the girl who gave up guitar to possess the discipline of the woman she would become.

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.

She knew there was a trapeze waiting for her. She just didn't yet believe she could hold on that long.

Eventually she did.

And I don't require every road I've travelled to justify itself by continuing forever.

Perhaps that explains some of my less consequential departures too.

I gave up ballet when I was a little girl because I didn't like it. My mother wasn't thrilled. Money had been spent. There was a ballet outfit. Presumably there had been an expectation that the outfit would enjoy a longer working life.

The year after leaving school, when I should have been in Year Eleven, I enrolled in senior English at night school instead. I was good at English, and the teacher outlined the challenging year ahead.

Fine. I was prepared for that.

Then I discovered that because I hadn't completed Year Eleven, I wouldn't receive the credit I'd thought I was working towards.

So I gave it up.

Again.

Good reason.

When I first arrived in England, I worked as a temp.

One agency sent me to an office in Bromley.

I can still see it.

I worked there for one day.

It was the most excruciatingly boring work I had ever encountered. Not difficult. Not challenging. Not something that would improve once I got through kilometre one.

Just deadly, irredeemably dull.

I went home and thought:

Life is too short for me to spend another day doing that.

So I called in sick.

This was dishonest.

It was also effective.

I never went back.

Decades later, the fact that I can still picture that office probably tells you how profoundly one working day in Bromley offended my central nervous system.

But here's the thing.

I don't wish I'd been more tenacious.

I don't wonder what glittering opportunities might have awaited me had I returned on Tuesday.

Perhaps I was three feet from becoming Assistant Regional Filing Coordinator.

I'll live with it.

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.

Every Friday spent digging for imaginary gold is a Friday not spent learning something you're good at, earning money, travelling, falling in love, being useful, being ridiculous, sitting in the sun, or discovering that your real talent was three streets away all along.

Persistence has an opportunity cost.

And that cost becomes particularly interesting when persistence begins to consume the very life it is supposedly going to improve.

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.

Depending on when you'd asked me as a child, I was going to be a vet, a police officer or an air hostess.

I managed two and a half of the three.

I became an air hostess first. When the airline collapsed, most of my friends stayed in aviation. They moved to other airlines and continued in the industry we knew.

I did too, briefly, if the Antigua operation can reasonably be described as an airline.

After that, I went sideways.

Something in me said:

It's time to join the police.

My reaction was essentially:

Oh. Okay.

So I did.

Years later, while I was living in England, another one of those messages arrived completely out of the blue.

It's time to go back to Australia now.

Again:

Oh. Okay.

No debate. No spreadsheet. No anxious weighing of alternatives.

The strange thing about these rare signposts is that I haven't argued with them. I've simply started rearranging my life around them.

When that second signpost arrived, there was no crisis forcing it. The trouble at work hadn't started.

I began quietly lining up the ducks for a return to Australia.

Then the police bullying started.

And it became bad enough that the orderly ending I'd been preparing for was overtaken by another one entirely.

One evening my boyfriend came over for dinner.

I cooked. We ate. We enjoyed the food. We laughed.

It was a genuinely happy evening.

Until suddenly I was crying.

And couldn't stop.

There wasn't one extraordinary thing that had happened that day. Once again, the final thing wasn't the thing.

Another wafer-thin mint.

He put me to bed.

The following morning, he rang my workplace to say I wouldn't be coming in.

I never went back.

I didn't know that had been my last day.

That sentence still does something to me.

We imagine endings will announce themselves.

LAST DAY.

FINAL PERFORMANCE.

CLOSING DOWN SALE.

Sometimes you just go home on an ordinary evening and only later discover that you crossed a border without seeing it.

My body apparently knew something before the administrative department of my brain had received the paperwork.

I wish I'd written down what happened during that period.

I wish it enormously.

There is a story locked somewhere in my memory from 1999 that I would love to be able to retrieve properly.

But I wasn't mentally well enough then to sit down and document what was happening to me.

The long period that followed was when I discovered why doctors keep a box of tissues on their desks.

I used them.

A lot.

So I can't demand that the woman I was then should have been taking notes for the writer I would become decades later.

She had another job at the time.

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.

The career 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.