Everything has an ending, doesn’t it? When we’re talking about life and relationships, the ending often brings out many emotions. Opposite to the ending, the start and beginning are often associated with joy and happiness. Other endings and beginnings, however, are often not so defined.
When you’re hungry, you feel a sense of gratification the minute you start eating. When you’re on an airplane starting a 5-day vacation to a tropical island, you’re happy and relaxed knowing the next few days will be enjoyable. When a baby is born, happiness is associated with the event. As the child grows up, all he is concerned with is how he will enjoy that day.
But when you finish eating and you’re full, you quickly forget the gratification you felt minutes earlier. Your return trip home on the airplane is filled with only memories of the enjoyment you experienced, as you slowly adjust back into the thinking mode of daily life that you associate with grunt work. When the baby grows up, has kids and grandkids of his own, he will lie on his deathbed where there is no happiness to be found. As the child grew older, he found less and less happiness from life.
But you will feel hungry again. You will look forward to another relaxing vacation sometime in the future. The grandfather on his deathbed will look in his grandkids eyes and remember his own childhood, feeling as though his life will somehow continue through theirs. The child grew up with memories of times when life was easy and now he spends his days working for just a taste of that pleasure.
The end, it would seem, is a means to the beginning. Without the end we could not have a beginning and therefore could not experience the joy and happiness associated with it.
But perhaps this ruthless cycle of beginnings and endings is trying to tell us something. In between the ticking second hand of a clock, between each beat of our heart, for the 300 or 400 milliseconds our are eyes are closed every time we blink there lies a calm silence; an eerie hint that maybe the ending has no relevance whatsoever.
Perhaps endings and beginnings only exist to distract us from what’s real. Maybe they are nature’s backup plan; a method of ensuring that we realize we need to do something with our life before “time” runs out. They allow us to structure things in manners easily defined. This post will end, so I’m able to write a new one tomorrow. The day will end, so a new one will start tomorrow.
But what if we lived life with no expectation of an end? Would it make us complacent and fearless? Would we become lazy and feel as though we can always put things off until tomorrow, since we’ll always have a tomorrow to get it done? What if we stopped thinking of days as beginning and ending and rather thought of them as lines on a sheet of paper waiting to be filled in with words?
If we’re all made of energy and energy truly cannot be destroyed, then energy doesn’t have an ending and neither do we. Therefore the purpose of an ending must be to amuse and entertain us; to tease us with that which we’ll never be able to experience.
