On beginnings and endings
Beginning. The word conjures many associations. Beginner’s luck. A student or traveler starting a journey. A new phase of life. Birth.
Ending. Another word people like almost as little as they like beginning. Plans gone astray. A journey completed. The completion of a thing or action taken. The end of a period in one’s life. Death.
These words can crush one’s spirit, or cause it to soar. There are many sayings about beginnings and endings, even proverbs: ” The wind from one door closing opens another.” We go through many beginnings and endings in our lifetimes: birth, school, graduation, marriage, having kids, watching the kids grow up and go out on their own, retirement, grandchildren, and the passing away of loved ones and ourselves.
It is one such ending, that of my divorce, that has brought me to this new beginning.
Oftentimes people only notice beginnings and endings when a major life event happens, and I think that’s why people are so scared of them. Endings are frightening because the familiar is going away. It may not even be good, but often the familiar, however bad, is preferable to the unknown. If endings are scary, beginnings are even more so. Endings are passing away of things, and we cause ourselves pain by holding onto the past. Yet, living in the past is easy, grasping the familiar, refusing to let it go, because we believe the familiar was the most precious thing we had.
A lot of people think beginnings require courage and bravery, that beginnings are for the adventurous. And there is a measure of truth to that. But what I have found, is that more than anything else, beginnings require trust. Trust that we will be ok, that things will work out. What keeps people from beginnings? Fear. Fear of failure, of looking foolish, of rejection by friends or family, or whatever their fear might be. It is this same fear that causes people to live in the past, or a nebulous future that never arrives, that prevents us from living in the present, from doing the things that need to be done in order to make a new beginning work.
My latest discovery about beginnings and endings is, I can have them anytime I want. I have the power to stop doing things that don’t work for me, and to start doing the things that do. Like this.