What is the Beginning?

What is the beginning?

In the beginning…. 

It’s a poetic phrase that begins a beautiful imagining of how it all began. 

But today, I find myself wondering what is the beginning? Or what is A Beginning. 

One child has ended their college career – and begun the next stage in his adult life. 

One child has begun a full time job, and her experience of summer pause abruptly ended. 

The third child will begin college at the end of the month, and he will end his time living at home full-time. 

And Marc and I will end a stage in our parenting and life together. As we begin the new one. 

Is a beginning an ending or an ending a beginning? 

One of the things that I wish most for in my life (and when I’m distracted or overtired I end up pressing for it), is a perfect to-do list. From big ideas and plans with EJPitman Coaching to the running and maintaining of a household, I am on the quest for completion. But I have found that no matter how hard I press the pen, or what kind of ink I use when I cross Laundry off a list, it is never done. 

I have heard that for every yes one gives, there are implicit no’s. Sometimes explicit. Almost everything takes space in our lives – our attention, our creativity, our relationships, our time. A yes dominos no’s. A no may clear the way for a yes. 

Or does it? 

What if it is more of a continuum than two check boxes? What if it is a teeter totter with each held in balance at different levels at different times? What if there are seasons, months, days, moons when sometimes a yes needs to be louder and at other times the no needs more volume? Maybe it’s not labelling things yes and no. Maybe it is People with one end of the continuum MANY and the other is FEW. Money connects saving to spending. Or Beginning and Endings create constant motion celebrating old and new. 

The mystery and invitation here is that living doesn’t require knowing The RigHT WaY or making tHE Right LIst or Having A PErfect PlAn. (Yes, all those odd caps are on purpose.)

The mystery and invitation – Listen, Watch, Observe my seasons, my moons, my days. Grow, Wait, Prune, Wait, Propagate, Wait, Grow, Wait. And in my growing in the knowing of myself, the yeses and no’s become a game and the beginnings and endings become a dance. 

And then it begins…. again.