Begin Again

Why endings are not our ruin, but our contraction and how to expand again

CAN I ASK YOU AN HONEST QUESTION?

Endings are not the hard parts of life, though for most, they feel that way. Endings become hard when we see them as the destruction of who we have always been. And when we believe destruction of the identity is also the destruction of the self, we suffer.

An ending can feel like losing yourself because you’ve become accustomed to living from only one chamber of who you have the potential to be.

We think we are one, uniformed essence, that there is a solitary ‘real self’ underneath all the conditioning and experiences that shaped us. But the unsettling discovery is that there is no singular self beneath it all, only the full range of parts we contain, most of which we’ve never met.

Most of us do not feel whole because we believe that those parts of us that are unfamiliar, under-explored, unexpressed, and mysterious are foreign fragments that do not belong. But all parts of you belong.

You are whole, but you’re living in fragments of self. When you stay within a selection of fragments, you contract and compress your essence. When you build a life entirely from an approved and familiar aspect of your multi-chamber self, endings feel like a loss.

But what if they were simply an invitation to move from a position of mere spectator — the one observing the other seemingly incongruent aspects of your inner being — to a participant, the one who lives inside of and in touch with those other, less familiar chambers of who you might actually be?

MIND THE GAP, IT’S NOT EMPTY

You already know something is ending, or has ended, or is trying to end. The question is not whether you can feel it, you know you can. The question is whether you are awake inside that experience, or watching it happen to you from a distance.

To participate in your own life rather than just witness it, you first have to know where you are. Not which city, not which stage, not which version of the story you’ve been telling — but where you actually are inside the honest cartography of your life right now.

Most of us can’t answer that because we genuinely don’t know.

We’ve been moving too fast to notice, or we’ve confused the map we made years ago for the territory we’re actually standing in. We’ve confused velocity with direction, productivity with progress, and arrival with meaning. We’ve been so committed to getting there that we’ve stopped asking where here actually is.

Before anything else — pause — and locate yourself.

What is true and what we rarely admit plainly is that you are not in just one place. You never are.

We are not a single story moving in a single direction. We are many cycles running simultaneously — some in their infancy, some approaching culmination, some slipping away to completion in the background while we look the other way.

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” — Heraclitus

The world is in flux. Yet the human brain craves stability, so it detects patterns and compresses movement into a labeled reality, and pretends it’s stable.

Endings confront the myth in the stories we’ve been telling and collapse the predictable continuity of both the future we were living toward and the familiar orientation of our identity of ‘us, in that context’.

While endings offer the opportunity to awaken to where we are, they more often thrust us from the experience of being there too long.

After an ending, people either cling to the past, or rush to the future.

We think we want to go back to the way things were, but we forget that it is impossible. The world we grew up in no longer exists. The way things used to be has dissolved, and so too has the version of us who belonged to that time and place. The river is always flowing.

And although it can feel like it, the river is not taking you away from your life. The river is your life.

But where is the river going? Once we release what’s already gone, we are overcome by a surge of action and aspiration for what comes next.

But the question is not, where are you going, only, where are you?

When helping others navigate their own endings, we know to meet people where they are. But how often do we meet ourselves there?

Where you are is in the space between identities. You are in the gap between who you were being and who you are becoming.

It may feel confusing, disorienting, even full of grief and longing because you are still trying to inhabit a reality that has already moved on.

The gap is a sacred space, a threshold to honor inside the suspension of forward momentum.

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In Japanese philosophy, Ma (間) is negative space that is not empty. It is the meaningful “in-between” space that allows things to exist more fully as themselves.

It is the silence between notes in music, the pause between breaths in speech, the space between objects that defines how focus lands on what is there, letting it breathe.

Ma is a form of relational presence. It is how we relate to the tension of non-form that becomes the signature texture of a life uniquely our own.

We tend to divide life into clean boundaries so we can define and make sense of it. But reality is not made of clean separations. It is not a tearing at the seams between closed and open states. It is continuous and in motion. Cyclical and spiraling — up, out, onward.

The gap, ma, the space in between the highs and lows of life is the very structure of our lives. It is where meaning is made. It is where we separate who we are from who we once were, where we learn to navigate the contrast of the various aspects of the different fragments and chambers of our being.

What happens between peak and valley, one event to the next, between win and loss, birth and death, creation and destruction — is the in-between. There is before, after, and now. But now is the only place we can truly exist.

We celebrate birth with love. We meet death with avoidance, denial, fear. But between them is our actual life — the dash on the tombstone. The weight of that dash is what represents our journey from there to here in our process of becoming.

We try to turn life into destinations: before and after. As if transformation is final, a sequence of moving from one fixed state into another. We transition from childhood into adulthood, from single to married, from overweight to weight loss, from poverty to wealth gain. We check the box with finality as if these are sealed thresholds we cross and never revisit.

But nothing is truly final in the way we imagine. We move through thresholds, but we also continue circling. So much of what is ‘over’ remains alive inside of us, only displaced, waiting to be remembered and re-engaged.

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“A threshold is not a simple boundary, it is a frontier that divides two different territories, rhythms and atmospheres.” — John O’Donohue, Benedictus

O’Donohue explored the etymology of the word threshold. It comes from ‘threshing,’ which means to separate the grain from the husk.

A threshold moment is not just a change. It is a process that reveals what is essential by stripping away what no longer belongs.

A threshold feels like loss, but it can also feel like clarity, if we are wise and still and willing enough to listen for that emergence.

Yet in a world in constant motion, there is a lived tension of being in the liminal space without rushing into the next identity, escaping the discomfort, or forcing conviction too early.

We cannot hold reality still, because nothing is still. But we can hold the urge to immediately define or resolve by holding our attention long enough to bring awareness to notice the change before it settles into meaning.

Some things do not need to be cured because they were never meant to be carried. Sometimes relief does not come through presuming a neat conclusion, but by feeling the soft realization that we no longer have to keep carrying the burdens we mistakenly learned to live with.

Thresholds are emotional events. Emotions feel like they require action because, biologically and psychologically, they often do. Emotions are designed to mobilize us, but thresholds ask for presence before action.

This is the benefit of pausing inside pivotal moments and learning to slow down, to fully experience the different qualities of presence gathered there, and to turn inward with undivided attention until we sense the inner voice, the feeling rather than the force, that is shifting us forward.

Change becomes a fundamental passage once you learn to inhabit your life consciously. What happens here, in the threshold, shapes who you become there.

You will get there, but right now, you are here. And it’s the only place you need to be.

WHEN YOU MOVE FROM THE MEDIAN

Life is not a sprint, but it’s also not a marathon. It might be most like an impossibly long triathlon, or a really disorganized heptathlon. Life is a series of undefined intervals of various lengths, intensities, and durations. Each with their own offer of growth, perspective, skill, and adaptation.

The in-between is the rest station, a transition zone where you reorganize and change systems. In triathlons, the swimmer must enter the transition tent to strip off their wetsuit and goggles before they slip into their cycling shoes and helmet.

You need only imagine how ridiculous, ineffective, and frustrating it would be to ride a bike in a wet suit to understand how rushing through every threshold in life is causing you similar pain.

Life needs us to honor the shift. Transitions are where life is actively reorganizing you.

Staying in the flux of continuous motion, no matter how imperceptible, is inevitable and unavoidable, but maintaining the same speed and direction is not.

Slowing down requires us to lose momentum.

In physics, momentum is continuity — mass × velocity, something our pattern-prone brains love. Momentum is what keeps something moving in a direction once it’s already in motion. But that same quality also means it is resistant to change. The more momentum you have, the harder it is to stop, and the harder it is to change direction without force or damage.

Inertia is the tendency of an object to resist changes in its state of motion unless acted on by an external force.

This is why some endings hurt so bad. We refused to slow down enough to not be shocked by the impact.

We associate momentum with progress, but often it’s just a prolongation of prior truth. When that truth ceases to exist, we lose the unconscious continuation and suddenly, we are asked to make another choice.

When we are no longer being carried forward automatically, released from an existence on autopilot, we are forced back into the uncomfortable position of the consciousness captain.

We are flung into a position of having to actually take the helm again, of owning our direction, choosing intention, and becoming responsible for who we are and where we go next.

Most people do not like this position. We flatten, medicate, distract, define, rush, perform. We choose the managed median over the volatile truth. We prefer something that feels stable, socially acceptable, and emotionally controllable, even if it isn’t fully real or alive for us. We look outside of ourselves, reaching for what or who is immediately there with little discretion or consideration other than relief from facing the tension in the transition.

So we rush the space, as we are a society so entrenched in our definitions, our labels, and the false security of our identity.

We call this time a void, and maybe it is so. But the secret blessing inside a void is that your distractions and disguises cannot join you here. This is precisely why we fear it. Inside the void, there is nothing but the naked nothingness of truth, no masks, no titles — just you and your mind, asking you to pay attention to what is.

Attention in the void is the awareness becoming aware of itself, which is the highest honor and deepest responsibility.

Consider what sinister spirit convinced us to live for the figurative Promised Land of tomorrow at the expense of today?

It is the human condition to skip through the experience of today by filling it with the output for tomorrow. Especially in modern life, each moment where something is “not happening” is an emptiness we interpret as failure. So we surrender all our energy and attention into distant horizons, rarely noticing the life that’s unfolding in the very moments we are trying to get through. And we wonder why life feels so unstable, so hard, so riddled with unwelcome change.

Attention is life directed. Where it goes, so you go, also. What it focuses on strengthens. Over time, what you repeatedly attend to becomes the architecture of your reality.

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For a long time, my attention was directed toward becoming less of myself. I just wanted to be stable, normal, and more like everyone else. I pursued this mythological desire for belonging until I found myself on a powerful cocktail of psychiatric medications that flatlined my entire reality.

The lows were gone, but so were the highs, and I started to worry the essence of my own self was gone with them.

At first it felt like I had just gone numb. I thought maybe I had become immune to suffering, but then I realized I was just suffering in a new way.

I could see life, I was even technically still in the experience of it, but I couldn’t reach it, I couldn’t feel it, I couldn’t participate in it. I was now separated from being in it by a glass that grew thicker and foggier and more muted by the day. I wanted to scream, but all I could do was watch life slip further away.

Yes, pain was gone, but so was excitement, anticipation, wonder, grief, desire, spontaneity — everything that made life life, and that was its own kind of pain, one I wasn’t prepared for.

I decided that I wanted to live in the wild, dangerous, openness of raw reality again. I would rather oscillate in the harsh volatility of what is genuine and abrupt. I would rather experience unfathomable highs and even endure the most unimaginable lows, in fact, I’ve even come to appreciate them. For the deeper the contrast, the more depth and sincerity is felt in gratitude.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The higher the high, the lower the low. Yet each low is matched with an equal potentiality for another high, it’s simply a matter of noticing and choosing. This is what creates the texture, meaning, and authenticity that makes our lives our own.

The fluctuation on the horizon is evidence of life itself and speaks to its very presence.

And between each rise and fall is the common ground that holds us all. The in-between is an ideological no-man’s land. It’s the middle territory, the landing space, the return to baseline centre where no matter how fleeting, it offers a reprieve. An offer of peace, trust, clarity, even love that is simply under-appreciated without knowing great distance from it.

In this sense, leaving the unsustainable polarity of extreme devotion to one chamber of life is less an absence and more a return to the magnetic centre of the fragmented but whole self.

Appreciating these seemingly conflicting tensions without resolving them reminds us that belonging does not come from fitting perfectly and finitely in an external state, but that we belong primarily and completely to ourselves. Understanding this makes us less likely to skip the less exciting middle, to dissolve the space inside the gap and close it just to prove some measure of worth.

Meeting yourself inside the threshold, you realize there is nothing to prove and no one to prove it to.

“Climb mountains not so the world can see you, but so you can see the world.” — David McCullough Jr.

I used to climb mountains to feel like I belonged. I wanted to be validated, accepted, seen and loved. But once I saw myself, there was no need to be seen by anyone else. I am no longer willing to climb another empty mountain for the sake of being seen, but now I climb because I so eagerly want to see more of the world.

STAY IN IT

I recently experienced the mountains (yes, plural) beneath me rupture and crumble. People have been asking me, “How are you coping? Are you doing okay?”

And the truthful answer is that I am the opposite of okay.

But I know one day I will be not just okay, but genuinely good again, so I keep marching toward that time until I am in it. My humble duty is neither to wait too long straining for the perfect conditions of its arrival, nor to miss it, but to notice goodness as it creeps back in, and when it does, to let myself live it.

When life asks us to slow down, we don’t listen, so life forces us and we freak out. We confuse slowing down with stillness. We think stillness is stagnant. But in reality, stillness does not exist. What if what we perceive as stillness is simply movement that has become so coherent you can no longer see it breaking apart?

My biggest joy through the pain of the last 12 months was how still I remained during the rupturing of everything I thought was stable and certain. I am grateful for how I observed first, how I stayed online in my life, although the urge was to run and run fast.

The biggest challenge through our biggest changes is to not default to what we have always known. For me, that meant not numbing out, distracting myself, pushing reality away or avoiding it, but staying in it. Being present with it, no matter how bad it hurt. Even when I most wanted to escape, I stayed.

Before life asks us to begin again, it first asks us to find where we are. A path that is truly our own is not as easily found as the obvious but misaligned options laid before us.

The path of a more integrated self reveals itself as we walk it. Thresholds are less a return to a place inside of us and more a reconnection to an ongoing communication with ourselves — the internal compass that nudges when we veer off course and edges us back toward what is most coherent with the whole of who we are.

You will get there, but right now you are here. This part has a purpose. To get there, you only need to keep moving in the right direction, but which is right is precisely what and why you’re here now, to come to know what you don’t yet know, or rather, what life is asking you to remember.

This is not easy, but it’s also not complicated. It asks you to suspend what you think you know by being open to more and attached to less.

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As kids, we are in such a rush to grow up, but the old only want to be young again. This is because time is a powerful lens through which we see our lives with new perspective. Everything we didn’t notice when we were restless and distracted now becomes important simply because it’s harder to reach.

What would you give to turn back time, for the chance to live one more day in the place, as the person, at the time of the then that you hurried away from?

We can’t go back. But we can save our future selves from such desires by asking: how much are you missing of what’s here in your avoidance of now?

There is something in this time right now that you will one day wish for that you are not appreciating fully — what is it? Bring it into centre focus. Give it your attention.

We retain memory only by making memory. We make memory by our presence and attention to the moment.

Life goes by faster when you stop paying attention to the moments that make a day and compound into the narrative of your life. We grow old when we stop having new experiences and go on autopilot. Thresholds invite us back into the attentive space of now and ask us to stay there long enough to notice something about where and who we are so that we come to know it as if for the first time.

We miss so many great treasures in ourselves and in our lives because we are absent in our experience of them.

How you are toward your life is the way life will be toward you. You get more of what you notice.

The outer world is a reflection of the inner one. An inner world that is painfully unobserved and neglected in favor of a future-world that might never exist is one that reflects very little of what we want to see.

Thankfully, we can change the lens anytime.

A threshold is a perfect place to pause and reassess what we’ve been seeking. It’s a chance to get curious and a choice to create a new, better lens, or a decision to keep the old ones.

In the space of nothingness, we can allow ourselves to be moved, transformed, impressed upon by the beauty of the moment without fear or assumption that we might be devoured by the void. It’s where we learn to trust that we are being transformed by it.

The space is a passage, not a problem. It’s a proximity, not a place. It’s a process and if you allow it, it can be a pleasure as well.

BEGIN AGAIN

“Omnia, Lucili, aliena sunt, tempus tantum nostrum est.” — Seneca

Everything is borrowed. Time alone is yours. But a life observed is not the same as a life lived.

Although we measure time as linear, we do not experience it so.

Time is not linear. It spirals outward, circling back upon recurring experiences, each enriched with their particular angle of novelty from the slight ways we’ve digested new understanding of the world, and ourselves. — from the Eternal Easter Series

Over and over, we move through the cycles of our life. We revisit, apply, learn, create, evolve — and around we go again. We repeat, but we can never repeat exactly. Life does not duplicate our experiences but meets us with similar lessons in different forms.

Nothing returns the same way twice, we don’t return the same either.

History doesn’t actually repeat itself, but it does echo. The pattern feels familiar, often eerily so, but it is not identical and always altered.

We try to make life permanent by capturing it, defining it, attempting to stabilize it; but life is not meant to be held. We cannot hold a life, only our attention to the experience of it as it moves.

The past is not behind you. The future is not ahead of you. They are both accessible in the now where you remember or imagine them. Eventually, everything becomes an invitation back to presence.

“And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And to know the place for the first time.” — T.S. Eliot

We do not move forward so much as we deepen, circling around what we thought we had already known.

Life is not a loop, but a spiral. To begin again is to reach the part of the spiral that expands from the edge of a similar point but with a different depth. The outer shape may feel familiar, but your position in relation to it has changed. You are not where you were but above it, beneath it, or beside it, in a place more spacious around it.

Life on autopilot is a looping reality that accelerates momentum. Endings inhibit our ability to complete another loop and place us into space undefined. Time does not stop, nor do you, although it feels that way sometimes.

The moment you realize you are on a new timeline is when you accept and actively choose the trajectory of your spiral. That choice is what moves you from spectator to participant.

The break in momentum and coherence feels like failure when really it’s a call for change and re-alignment — beginning again is actually evidence that you’re still in motion.

The collapse of one chamber of our lives can feel like ruin if it’s the only place we’ve allowed ourselves to be. But each fragment within us is a chamber of its own just waiting to be explored and strengthened. What dissolves restores our capacity to grow in different ways and in different places.

We think these spaces of transition are embarrassing blemishes to cover up and hurry through as we continue advancing our lives toward their otherwise noble striving for growth. The strange truth is that the more we rush the threshold, the more life returns us to it, asking us to learn what we keep trying to forget what we know.

Endings are the unwelcome vehicle for growth. The difference between looping and spiraling is that looping assumes there is one real self to return to while spiraling understands there never was.

We have so much we want to become, we can become, we might become; but we are not any of it until we first acknowledge who we are.

You can’t actually operate from anywhere other than your current reality. The moment you stop pretending otherwise by perpetually orienting toward a future version, the more honest the relationship you build with yourself.

When change happens we want the change to complete quickly so we can get to where we think we should be. We mistake progress for continuity. The paradox is that acceptance itself is the progress.

You grow the moment you stop trying to be elsewhere and fully accept where you already are. So where are you?

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❥ Staying in it with you, a fellow participant, SJT