When I think about beginnings, the first thing that comes to mind is a bright line: a vivid stroke of vibrant light that swings around and floats in the air, gliding and drawing shapes on a dark surface, always expanding itself and leaving a trace wherever it passes.
Perhaps my initial description is not a concrete representation of beginnings, but it is the only thing I can picture when I think of a start. After this depiction, everything gets blank. Opaque. Silent. A void. Though not for long: such abstraction soon transforms itself into real shapes and things.
I see a beginning as anything: a Big Bang; a glance; a smile; a “hey, do you know the answer for the question 3?”; a peck; Everything can be the start of something, even an ending. See, classifying things really depends on the prism through which you view them.
With time, the idea that beginnings were “anything” started to sound too generic. I wasn’t really satisfied with this concept, so I decided to do some field researching. My first stop was the dictionary: Commencement: “A beginning or start”; Start: “begin or be reckoned from a particular point in time or space”. I added these definitions to a notepad and asked some friends: “What is a beginning? Any idea?”. The majority of the replies were kind of naughty: “Well, a beginning is a beginning, it is self-explanatory, man! What a rhetorical question!”
Yup, I ended up just sticking with my first source – the dictionary – and moved on.
A word started to pop up here and there, bothering me just like the buzzing sound of annoying mosquitos flying over your head in a hot day.
“Origin”.
Do you remember when your life started? Wait up! Before you too get naughty and reply something along the lines “With my parents, duh”, which would make me cry in fetal position, I’d like to mention that I am not referring to the biological side of it, but rather your first memory. The furthest remembrance you can recall. The latter is what instigates and interests me, because it reflects on what your perception of origin is. Not the one on your birth certificate. Yuck. It is about the commencement of everything for you, your starting point.
To me, my origin is defined by an ordinary weekday, a cloudy, boring, and dull one. “Boring” because it was a school day. “Dull” because I always detested grey days.
I remember standing still in front of the kindergarten school’s gate waiting for it to open, while my mom was resting her hands on my shoulders. I still can feel the anxiety nestling against my chest whenever I remember that day: All I wanted was the gate to open up so that I could pass through it and run towards the classroom to play with my friends. I think I was five, but I am not sure.
This was my beginning… How I remember starting to exist.
What comes after is a huddle of memories and fragments of disconnected scenes, followed by a bunch of unrecognised muffled voices and blurry faces I can no longer recall.
For some time, I thought I had better just stick with the definition of beginning that I found in the dictionary and just occupy my mind with something else. However, I would be pestered by new questions that would arise about geneses. Now this was all about what could trigger new starts: epiphanies, crushes, Platonism…
What can set things off? Would things be “activated” by “destiny”? What IS destiny? How profoundly can a single choice impact our lives? What determines the unfolding of the whole chain of events that paves the way in our lives? What actually initiates our beginnings?
Whatever the answer is, we are surrounded by starting points. They are like particles that encircle us and get activated constantly, generating all sorts of chain of reactions that guarantee the instability in our lives. They transform us, functioning as gears that keep turning so that our lives keep moving. Whatever that means and for whatever reason.
The beginning. The starting point, but also the arrival one.
The beginning. A digested ending?
I find myself in my last conclusion: Life is like an electric slot car racing toy set: you come and go in full speed trying to hold tight on whatever you can, hoping that the next curve won’t throw you off the rail. Time is racing with you, going as fast as it can. A single blink translating to a whole decade. Both of you don’t stop. You can’t stop. Maybe nobody ever can.
And with every new step, there is a new start. Something new comes up all the time.
And every brand-new is just another opportunity to build whatever you want to.
We are our own beginning.
Likewise, we are our own end.