Endings and beginnings. Both are rife with the unknown. Both require a departure from what has been understood as the norm and invite us to change. We humans don’t like change, especially when we have not asked for it. We like what we know and what we can understand. Mystery is great for novels and the Big Screen, but to acknowledge it as part of our lives means to relinquish control and surrender to the unknown. We get comfortable in our routines; with the people around us, our day-to-day obligations, our to-do lists for tomorrow. Then we’re asked to change and we resist – comfortable in what we know, anxious about what we don’t know. Endings cause us to let go of what is familiar and often what we love; require us to shed some part of ourselves, that we may or may not be willing to release, in order to begin again. Endings and beginnings are the great dichotomy – one cannot exist without the other. As the band Semisonic penned in their 1998 song, “Closing Time,” “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” Change involves loss. We grieve what we lose. We learn to accommodate that loss into life. We begin again. This is what it means to be human; to keep putting the pieces of our brokenness together, in order to become a new version of whole.
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