Change is the only real constant in the world. It’s both accepted and rejected, yet inevitable. If you are alive, life will change. Today, tomorrow, the following. Every second that ticks by there is one less moment that you will live on the face of this earth: and it will never be the same. What legacy does your change leave?
I fight with the idea of legacy, and how the endings in my life have become my beginnings. I look from this same window where I wrote last year, in an office that is totally different, save the bright yellow walls. Gone are so many of the theology books, and the walls are filled with degrees and art. Everything is in a different place. Different computer, different phone, different me. I’m with a different church organization now, a beginning wrought in the ending. Sometimes, the endings are your choice. More often than not, the choice is stripped from you like a cosmic novel, where only page is revealed at one time. The change in my house, my surroundings reflects the change in me. I have grown. I’m not the same.
Endings just are. All the while, through this window, fall will come, then winter, then spring. Words will appear as I type, classes will accumulate and life will go on. No one walks out on their own story, you see. It is with you no matter the change.
Ending, beginning, ending. How do you find peace in the chaos of it all?
The wind and the seasons blow through the year, the children grow and all that you feel you know shifts slightly on it’s base. Like the leaves in the wind we drift from time to time, here first and then there, lighting for a while on what is life.
Endings come, and with it, there is a sadness, an almost compulsive need to hold on and never, never let go.
I’m learning as time goes on that the wisest counsel I have ever had is to hold on to life with hands loosely open. I hold nothing so tightly that I am going to choke out the life. With open hands, I can receive. It make you feel crazy at times, the changes and the endings. The children who grow and leave, and you’re left looking at your life not as a parent for once, but as a person that has never achieved what it was you set out to do in life. Suddenly, the race seems overwhelming. You just started, but somehow a decade just few right by. How does time fly by so quickly?
Beginnings are borne as you stand there in the ashes of what used to be, still clothed in the garments of yesterday until love comes along and helps you to see that the new season requires a new cloak, new shoes. Before long, the beginning is life in the day, and you are only vaguely aware of that moment of ending, that moment when you thought that all was lost and you could never breathe again.
Begin, live, end. Begin again. Live. Like poetry, every life touches another, leaving just the faintest blush. Some lives collide, destroy, change the trajectory of your path forever. There may be a pain that never leaves you, but comes to live as part of who you are, indistinguishable from the rest of the whole. It helps you ground, it helps you know.
Endings are beginnings in disguise.
They are, if you let them, the hope of tomorrow and the fulfillment of dreams. The possibility of what can be, now that you’ve laid aside that which is simply done in your life. Now that you’ve said good bye, and buried all the remains in honesty and integrity.
Change = Tough.
Now that you’ve cried.
Now that you’ve gasped for air with the thought of change.
Now that you’ve grown.
Endings become beginnings from that first moment, from the second that your body feels it,
opposes it,
scratches and claws to let the seasons stay the same
and for the summer to never end,
to never let go.
Then, the leaf catches the wind and there is nothing left but to move forward.
It’s the Jordon in front of you, the column of smoke by day and fire by night. Once you put your feet in the water toward the promised land, it’s all uphill and there is no going back. Maybe that is a strange way to look at it, but every beginning seems to reqire that you are all in. Sold out.
How does a broken heart go all in, I am asked. One step at a time. Just one day. One hour. Breathe in and out for this one day, and tomorrow, it will be easier. One day, you won’t need to think about breathing anymore. Just….breathe.
It’s God going by any name, be it fate, karma, the universe, the divine…all leading you, pushing you, teasing you into looking into the glass and asking that one question….. who am I?
Are you willing to accept the change?