“The End of the Beginning”
June 25, 2010admin 2 Comments »If I learned anything from reading the news in the past year, it’s that titles and the last line of things actually make a big difference. The former to entice a person to read something, and the latter to ensure that they are left with the right impression. I want to get better at both.
By all rights I should either be asleep or trying to sleep right now. I’m getting up at 3:40 AM so that I can get to Milwaukee in time for my 7 AM flight to DC tomorrow. I tried to sleep for what felt like a long time (but, now looking at a clock, I realize was only a half hour). I’m awake because there’s a thunderstorm off in the distance enticing my consciousness and because I have a flight tomorrow and I always get a little anxious before travel.
But the real reason I’m awake is because this trip feels especially important. You see, this, by some metrics, is the last night of what was. And tomorrow is the first day of what will be. Having graduated from college, I haven chosen a city (or really a district) to make my home. I came back to Wisconsin and lallygagged about for a month, spending time with my family and sleeping as much as possible. But that’s all over. Schooling for me is really over. It was technically over a month ago, but not until tomorrow will I begin the real search for a job, a place to live, and a life to have.
I feel as though I’m off to “suck the marrow”. I’m off to carpe diem and noctem and all the other times of the day. I’m not sure that this is because I want to be doing these big, poetic things, but more because I have to. Forward motion is all I’ve got.
Recently, I’ve found myself slightly nostalgic for days when I was younger and the things I faced were a bit simpler. I’m not nostalgic for these times because I really wish to be younger, but because I never realized that I was, say, 12, and that my world was composed of 12 year-old things. I lacked awareness. I wish I could go back not so as to be 12 again, but to be 12 and know that I am 12.
So that is my resolution. To remember that there will come a day when I will look back at 22 and this flight to DC and think, “Wow, I had so much in front of me then. I had so many opportunities and ways that I could engage the world because I was 22 that I can no longer access. I can no longer befriend other 22 year-olds in the same way. That way of life and mode of conduct no longer suits my interests or experience. But it sure was great when I had it.”
I don’t want to miss anything. I don’t want to mess anything up. I don’t live in fear that I will, but I do live aware that I’ve only got one chance to do it right. The distance in my mind between the realm of possibility, those paths that I could take, and the realm of actuality, the choices that I did make, are so far apart that I often forget actuality exists. I find myself riding up and down my sister’s driveway with my niece and nephew, a possibility at the forefront of my thoughts whenever I’m in Madison, and have to remind myself that this possibility is actually happening and that is exactly what I want to be doing with my time. Make possibilities actual always seems like something I can do tomorrow. I forget that possibilities are happening all the time.
I put the below quote in my high school year book, along with another silly quote by Douglas Adams about deadlines and missing them. It was true then because I was leaving high school and home in a big way, off to the state of Maine and a college of my choosing. But high school was never all that emotionally significant to me. High school was simply a part of life, whereas Bowdoin was a path less traveled; it was a choice. I’m sure the quote will feel true again one day, maybe before I go to off to grad school or law school. Before I have get married or have kids or change careers or move to a new town. But it feels especially true today, in a way that I don’t think it’s felt like before and in a way I don’t think it will feel like again. And that is really exciting.
“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” -Winston Churchill
Posted on June 27th, 2010 at 1:43 pm
I liked this post a lot, Joe. And I wish you wonderful good wishes as you start this new chapter. I was just reading a blog post by one of my very favorite writers, Katrina Kennison, and I thought that the following passages…as she reflects on uprooting her family and moving out of state…an interesting counterpoint to your musings:
http://www.katrinakenison.com/ordinary-day-journal/2010/6/26/homecomings.html
“The day we moved away six years ago — a day that I saw at the time as a wrenching finale to our sons’ childhoods and the life we’d known — was in fact no such thing. It was just a day. Life transforming itself the way it does: this happens, and then that happens. In Buddhism it is said that all causes and conditions are related; that the world exists in a state of interdependence. Because one thing arises, another arises; because of this, that.
And so it occurs to me now that I was mistaken to ever think of life as a simple series of endings and beginnings. How self-defeating, to try so hard to grab hold of those things I wanted to keep intact, with the idea that permanence just might be possible. Sitting here by myself, looking at the empty shell of a house that was once stuffed full of us — but that is now the center of another family’s universe — I think I finally get it: home really is the place where I am right now, if I choose to make it so. And if I’m awake, and open, and loving what is, then I am always at home, no matter what roof is above my head or what return address I stamp in the upper corner of an envelope.”
I hope that in the next months, you find a home that is where you are. And that your beginning of your middle (??) is an exhilarating one.
Posted on July 2nd, 2010 at 8:36 pm
The Fall after I completed my undergrad degree, my mother gave me the first quilt she had ever made as a graduation gift. On the back, she had written this inscription:
“May your life be like this quilt- perhaps not free of mistakes- but full of color, warmth, and love.”
Now about that “mistakes” bit … At the time, I did NOT like the implication that I might make mistakes along the way or that perhaps I had already made a mistake or two here or there. Perfectionist, summa cum laude, no mistakes allowed, no way.
Several years and a good many mistakes later, I think I understand the inscription a little better.
In order to figure out what you want in life, you have to open cans of worms, or get it a bit messy, or whatever you want to call it. Jobs, marriage, kids– those can all be cans of worms, yet very WORTHWHILE cans of worms.
Moving to a new place, moving outside one’s comfort zone … life goes forward because you do “mess it up” now and then! Just a thought. You may feel that you have one chance to do things right, but always remember there is more than one way– many, many paths to having a wonderful life.