Beginnings...

Instagram search for #beginnings - the hashtag being almost impossible to locate on an Apple Keyboard (is Steve Jobs advocating for a world without hyperlinked discourse, searchable by theme, from beyond the grave?) and you discover that ALL ENDINGS ARE ALSO BEGINNINGS - ALL GREAT THINGS HAVE SMALL BEGINNINGS - EVERYTHING CHANGED THE DAY I DECIDED THAT YOU ARE MY LESSON NOT MY ENEMY.

Wouldn’t it be nice, though, if a beginning could sometimes be something entirely self-started?

A minor-big-bang of a beginning exploding politely out of unsuspecting nothingness?

An immaculate conception of a beginning, whose origins and purpose are mysterious to all but the highest of powers?

A single, inexplicable blade of grass in the otherwise heartless desert?

No such luck here - my beginnings all seem to have their predictable genesis in the endings of other things: the pre-pandemic state of now haphazardly recreated ‘normalness’; the series of existential crises of a thirty-year old who has probably read too much and lived too little; a seven-year career cycle fallen blindly into like a cave full of disappointed bats.

Still, I’ll take it.

There’s probably fair reason why we seem to be obsessed with cyclical cycles - self-devouring circles and their close cousins are everywhere, from the Hero’s Journey, to the tail eating snake of the ouroboros, to Facebook’s latest rebrand.

Perhaps it’s natural, and comforting, to think of every beginning as just another point on an infinite continuum, rather than the first blot of ink on a terrifyingly white and empty page.

It keeps us conscious of the fact that this new beginning will, one day, become the ending that inspires the next.

There you go, I’ve come up with another one. Take that, Instagram.

#beginnings.