How endings and beginnings affect your life.

Endings and Beginnings

“The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.”
Ivy Baker Priest, in Parade, 1958

Have you ever come to a place in your life where you are confused with what you see around you? Do you interpret that place as a new beginning or do you feel that it is an ending of a portion of your life? How do you know the difference between the two? Are you at a beginning or an end, a block or interruption, a desired break or an untimely dead-end?

“We begin to see that the completion of an important project has every right to be dignified by a natural grieving process. Something that required the best of you has ended. You will miss it.”
Anne Wilson Schaef

That place of confusion is the moment when you let go of the ‘old way’ or is the feeling of sadness when you say goodbye. It is a time when you feel the most alone and when you need the help of others to carry you over the threshold of a new direction in life. You feel fragile and understand the remarkable emotions of being alive.

“No man with a man's heart in him, gets far on his way without some bitter, soul searching disappointment. Happy he who is brave enough to push on another stage of the journey, and rest where there are living springs of water, and three score and ten palms.”
Brown

I’m at a place in my life where these moments of confusion seem to converge into a laser like beam of awareness. Endings and beginnings seem to meld together and each becomes blurred into the other. Instead of seeing the sadness of an ending or the joy and elation of a new beginning I see a continuum of events where each is responsible for the next and all build upon the other. I find confusion is replaced by clarity and sadness is replaced with determination.

“A whole is that which has beginning, middle and end.”
Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC), Rhetoric

We should no longer seek to see the beginnings of things nor yearn to say goodbye to an end. What we need to seek is to see the vision, create, and understand the whole of who we are. The realization of the totality of who we are is the greatest gift that life gives to us. When we understand that the process we are in is not compartmentalized into beginnings and endings we find our lives becoming harmonized into the wholeness of who we are.

“When our eyes see our hands doing the work of our hearts, the circle of Creation is completed inside us, the doors of our souls fly open, and love steps forth to heal everything in sight.”
Michael Bridge

By focusing on the wholeness of who we are we begin a new direction in our life. We step forth into the light and become a beacon for others to follow. Our life becomes full of wonder for it is the act of becoming whole that allows us to see with new eyes and to understand our pathway in life.

“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.”
Herman Melville

It is not the beginning nor is it the end that encapsulates our essence but it is the path that lies between. It is that path that forms the story of who we are. We are the sum of all our actions, deeds, and contributions all of which can be filtered like a rainbow or can be seen as the brilliant light of your soul.

“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.”
Carl Jung (1875 - 1961), "Memories, Dreams, Reflections", 1962