Things always get good right at the very end, have you ever noticed that?

The moment you declare your plans to leave your current job, your workplace becomes an efficient and jovial atmosphere.

Right when you decide you need to end a relationship, the person whom you’re involved with starts doing and saying all the things you’d wished they’d been doing, all along.

Just when you’re ready to graduate, you find yourself feeling completely contented at your school.

When you find a new house to move into, the reasons why you wanted to move suddenly become moot points. Your nasty neighbor up and moves away, himself. Or dies! Your kids’ school gets favorably redistricted. The city finally paves the street you could no longer stand ruining your tires on every day.

This has happened to you, yes? It’s practically a guarantee in life. Right before the ending life turns sweet on you.

It’s easy to see this as some cosmic joke–a twisting of the plot designed to make you question your instincts.

It’s possible, even, to view this as a reason why you shouldn’t proceed with your decision to go out of town, to move cities, to take a new job, to end a relationship.

After all, why leave now? Why walk away? Why make a change when suddenly everything seems just great and so darn swell? What are you, some kind of masochist?

But there’s another way of looking at this altogether.

Rather than make you feel crazy, you may see this last, most sweetest chapter as the universe’s grace.

Since we aren’t really fundamentally selfish (most of us anyhow) we feel reluctant at best about walking away from people, places, or circumstances that are in terrible upheaval. Ironically, it’s often the worst case scenarios–the most unhealthy people, the most dysfunctional workplaces, the least fulfilling life paths that are the hardest for us to leave. We fear for their fates in our absence. Or, we’re too focused on the issues occurring outside of ourselves to be able to heed and nourish the voice inside that tells us we’re ready for something different.

But when people seem to suggest they’ll be alright without us, when workplaces appear as though they’ll go on just fine– when everything cooperates in just the way you’d hope it would–when what we perceive outside ourselves is continuity and functionality, that’s the moment when our inner voice most clearly breaks from the crowd and can be heard. That’s when we can recognize that although the present circumstances bear the aspect of familiarity, that’s no longer enough of a reason to stay. That’s the universe’s blessing: See, everything will be alright here. You go ahead.