New Beginnings

by Sidney S. Stark

Is it really true that a new beginning has to herald an end? I used to think it meant a fresh start on a new clean slate. That implied things would be better; that you wouldn’t make the same old mistakes or repeat the same patterns.
I always looked forward to fall and the start of a new school year when I was a child for just that reason. I could stock my new black three-ring notebook with fresh, clean paper. The paper would be placed neatly between pristine colored dividers all labeled clearly to organize my work. There would be no spillage from one subject to the next; no surreptitious stealing of paper from one section to donate it to another and no stuffing with unrelated non-academic subjects that eventually stretched the binder’s inflexible backbone ‘till it broke. Each year I hoped the notebook would end the year in the same state it had started with at its immaculate conception. In all of about a month my resolutions for a new beginning and plans for perfection would disappear under a mountain of disorganized chaos. Every year I made a pledge to myself to maintain this new way of working, and each year I was disappointed.
Part of this failure I know was because I was changing too fast as I slid from six to sixteen. I didn’t have time to figure out where I was starting from each fall. Had the summer really changed me so much? But there was a much bigger problem with my reasoning. I never learned I’d have to change things on the inside before the ones on the outside would cooperate. Setting up a new notebook with all its physical manifestations of tidiness and discipline wasn’t enough to make my approach to my work and my world ordered and disciplined. Perhaps I was going through my own physical changes so fast there wasn’t any way to catch up.
I see now that I didn’t make time to give my objectives room to percolate in their transitory state. Slow simmering is necessary to produce a real change that will last and I was in too much of a hurry for that. The uncomfortable place where nothing seems to be happening but everything is really changing has to be inhabited for awhile before the new beginning can occur. Maybe my Sagittarian birth sign or the fact that I was the youngest child in a family of five daughters put me in a perpetual hurry. It’s ironic though that in childhood there’s all the time in the world to let things happen slowly and they never do, while later life impresses us with the lack of time left to approach new challenges but we try to ignore them. Naturally that’s when the importance of slowing down the process is finally understood. New beginnings are filled with ironies like the fact that time is a human construct.
And so, if time isn’t really real but only a matter of our own personal perception, then a new beginning may not be the start of something at all. It could actually be the end of a long, slow, creative process that finally culminates in fundamental change. That’s the focal point isn’t it? Change; it’s the crucial result that makes all that simmering worthwhile. But we’ve got to learn how to put just the right amount of energy into the process and not overdo it. Trying too hard is going to give you a clean notebook that fast becomes a mess.
How can you tell that you’re efforts to move forward are real enough to break the ties that hold you back? You can’t. By the time it happens the change will have been so gradual you’ll already be looking for another fresh start; the start of a new school year, a new notebook, or a new life. That new beginning is the maturation of the last transformation and the secret to the next one is just relaxing and learning to appreciate the passage.

Question @You: Do you welcome new beginnings or dread them? Why? Please leave a comment.

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