Podcast · Trailblazers & Titans
Tramontare:
When a Story Is
Finished, Not Failed
On Trailblazers & Titans with Dr. Keith Haney I mentioned an Italian verb that has no good English equivalent, and told Keith I would come back and expand it. Here it is.
Tramontare: to set, as the sun sets. To go down, to pass beyond the mountains. It carries the connotation of completion rather than failure, and English has no single word for it.
The black hole that isn’t there
We know that at the end of the day the sun sets, and we are fine with it. We understand that night is coming. We understand that the sun will rise again tomorrow. Nobody experiences the evening as a defeat.
But when people look at their own stories, they often see a black hole at the end. The career that shaped them. The role that made them legible to other people. The version of themselves that worked. When those things start to finish, the ending gets read as failure, and the failure gets attributed to the person.
That reading is wrong, and it is expensive. It keeps people inside configurations that stopped serving them years ago, defending something that has already done its work.
A story is not good or bad
This is the part people find hardest. Your story was not a mistake. You had it because it was serving you, at some point in time, for some reason. The question is not whether it was a good story. The question is what serves you now.
Sometimes the work is not adding a new chapter. It is allowing an old one to end. The career that shaped your twenties and thirties may have completed its developmental purpose. The relationship that structured your identity may have reached its natural limit. The beliefs that carried you through one phase may not survive the next.
Letting these configurations set is one of the hardest things a person can do. It is also one of the most necessary.
What it looks like when someone can’t
A successful businessman came to me last year, mid-fifties, thinking about retiring. His question was practical: how do I organize my life to make the most of it? No financial issues, healthy, perhaps thirty good years ahead. What should he do with them?
As we worked through it, that turned out not to be his concern. What he was actually afraid of was how people would look at him once he was no longer the successful businessman. What would they think of him now that he was not that?
He did not have a scheduling problem. He had not yet let the old story set, and so there was nothing for a new one to begin from. We spent a few months on what the new stories might be, several of them rather than one, and then he found his own path, with some trial and error. Only through that process could he test the water and feel which one was right.
The part that gets skipped
None of this is a licence to leave. Genuine revision has to be told apart from rationalized flight, and the difference is not a feeling. Revision tends to be warranted in three cases.
- 01The commitment has become nostalgicYou are maintaining it out of loyalty to a past story rather than present orientation.
- 02The commitment has become obsceneIt is causing harm out of proportion to the good it serves.
- 03The commitment is organized by fantasyIt rests on something you have never examined rather than on a clear-eyed reading of where you actually are.
When none of those hold, the impulse to change may itself be the avoidance, a flight from what the current situation is actually asking of you. Sunset is not the same as walking out before dark.
Digging, or composing
Most advice on this treats the self as buried treasure: dig down, strip away the conditioning, find the real you. If that is true, then a crisis means you dug in the wrong place, and the only response is to dig harder with a better map.
The other view is that a self is composed rather than excavated. Drafted, revised, never quite finished. If that is true, then a crisis means the current draft has reached its limits, and the task is not to find the original manuscript. It is to begin the next revision.
Sometimes the bridge is small. Sometimes the bridge is very large. What does not change is that you have to let one side end before the other one can hold you.
Recorded with Rev. Dr. B. Keith Haney for Trailblazers & Titans. The episode is “Less Hustle, More Clarity: Rethinking Growth with Federico Malatesta,” released 14 August 2026. Keith also writes and speaks at Becoming Bridge Builders.
The Identity Dimension in an Ending
A practical tool for anyone deciding whether a commitment has finished.
When people decide to end something, the deliberation is usually about the practical arrangements. This checklist focuses on what most of that deliberation overlooks: whether the commitment has completed its work, or is still asking for something you would rather not give.
Where this comes from
Coming out this fall
They Are Lying to You
The Self-Help Delusion
This page is a very brief summary of one idea from Part IV, where the argument turns from what the industry gets wrong to what is actually there instead.
Learn more about the book