New Beginnings

Beginnings are always considered very auspicious. It is said that a thing well begun is a job half-done… It is also said that all’s well that ends well. So one really can’t decide based on proverbs! When you really think about it, proverbs may have been the Old World’s answer to punch dialogues... There is one for almost every situation and there is no real good come-back – unless it’s another proverb! It’s nice to imagine a sort of cave-man Rajinikanth spouting proverbs, right? So, let’s keep it that way!

 Now coming back to beginnings! Beginnings signal hope. They are filled with the things that can be, heights that can scaled (& the light in our eyes say ‘we will’), goals that can be reached and surpassed... Beginnings are about dreams (the good part, before DiCaprio takes over!) This is why we place such importance to beginnings. We wish each other luck. We pray fervently for success. We celebrate the anniversary of a beginning (mostly these are just called birthdays), and form a new beginning then and there… Each New Year we resolutely begin resolutions and promptly forget them until the next one. Yes, we like our beginnings... More importantly we like celebrating our beginnings! Any situation in our lives that changes us ever so slightly, can be (and unfortunately, often is) considered a beginning. We humans are addicted to a drug we call hope- not all addictions are bad of course - but do we tend to gravitate more on defining and celebrating beginnings than in the actual process itself?

I remember clearly, when I was young and my Dad bought our house a vacuum cleaner. During the initial days, me and my brothers (I have two elder brothers. So yes, I was trained for the battle of life!) used to fight over who gets to clean the house and use the coveted vacuum cleaner. We ran it almost thrice a day and everyday we used all the possible accessories that came with it (especially the water-spraying one! God, those were good times!) Anyway, as you can probably guess, after about a month or so, the vacuum cleaner lay forgotten. I would like to say that I was the one who persisted the most, but my memory fails me there. It became an occasional thing to use the vacuum. Our ever-fickle minds moved on to the next thing. At the age that we were, that may have anything from the neigbour’s new car to the new blue tennis ball that we bought! But this little anecdote is to drive the point that the beginning here was basically pointless. Which brings me to the point that I have been trying to make – what should be considered a beginning?

Very often when we look at things from a distant sort of perspective, our idea of the thing itself changes. This maybe true with beginnings too! We may think something began at some point of time but when we think back to the thing it may really seem like it began a long time ago. I know that sounded totally Zen (I can get that way sometimes:P), so let me explain with an example. Uncle Ted decides to tell his kids the story of how he met their mother. He thinks of starting with the actual moment he met her, but then he starts thinking about the events that led up to that moment. So he decides to unravel back. He unravels till he reaches another important moment. That was the beginning he thinks... But wait, how did that moment come to pass? So he unravels a bit more and eight seasons of a hit TV show are done and yeah we still have little/no clue about the mom! Now I wouldn’t really advice you to follow Ted as a role-model. (If you have to choose a role-model from HIMYM, please, choose Barney. He is legen-wait-for-it-dary, right!!) But if you really did follow Ted’s line of thinking, you would keep going until the big bang (whose theory of course, is another hit series). And that is just how far science goes. Depending upon your religious views and your notions of human society, the true beginning that you think of may vary, like crazy! 

                             
So yes, you see my point. You have laughed across the way. So now, dear reader, we come to what is another staggeringly important part - the conclusion. (All’s well that ends well, right!). My conclusion is that we really need to start celebrating the middle a bit more. Doesn’t it make infinitely more sense to celebrate when you don’t have a reason to? For starters, it gives you a reason to! So, here’s to a new beginning celebrating the middle! Amen to life:)