Endings & Beginnings

Friday was a day of lasts.

I am always fascinated by endings. Book endings can be incredibly satisfying or incredibly not. I can never decide which way I feel about the ending to the Divergent trilogy by Veronica Roth. Read it and let me know how I’m supposed to feel?

I can’t always decide how I feel about the endings of chapters of life, either.

Sometimes the chapters are little ones: the end of a conference. The end of a week-long vacation. These endings are there: you can feel them, think about them. But they are not usually life-altering. The next day you return to routine and life is the same again – maybe a little different, depending on the conference or the vacation, but still very much the same.

And sometimes endings are much bigger: the end of college, then end of your first love. These endings are harder, more stressful. They stick with you and stick with you and become part of your life experience. How you interpret the world. How you interpret those chapters. The endings often mark the way we look back, clouding the beginnings and the middles that we see through the lens of those endings.

I find the trouble with most endings is that they are muddled in with the feelings of a new adventure.

In May, I slept a last night in a first home and been torn between the desire to stay and the desire to move on to the next.

In July, I spent a last day at my first job out of college, sad to be leaving but knowing that I would grow more outside those walls.

On Friday, I spent a last day at my second job out of college, knowing that it wasn’t right for me. I spent the last two weeks so excited to start a new adventure, my sights set forward while my tasks still very focused on the old.

The in-between times are often a blur: wrapping up one project to dive into the excitement of the next. Emotions conflicting, stress levels elevated.

I made it to Saturday morning exhausted at the idea of endings. There have been so many this year. It takes so much to process them. They hurt and they stretch and they make us think of what we could have done differently, better.

But endings are necessary for new adventures to start, so we go through them. Sometimes willingly, sometimes less so. I don’t think we would if there wasn’t something unknown and exciting drawing us toward them from the other side.

I suppose it’s good that I am also fascinated by beginnings.