Endings and Beginnings

A few weeks ago, Noah started kindy. He's an open, friendly little guy and has no trouble socialising. He's adventurous, curious and intelligent and is always up for some new and interesting experience, so getting him along to a place with a sandpit full of diggers, scheduled morning tea and lots of other kids was no big problem. A week or so later though, a penny dropped for him that kindy wasn't so much a welcome break in his usual routine as a whole new routine in itself and that's where he balked. Poor wee guy. He was having his first immersion in this pattern which we all repeat time and time and time again. Life is a constant series of endings and new beginnings. We start something or we join something or we learn something and the something suits us well. We get adept at it and comfortable in it and, if we are lucky, enjoy it. Then it ends and we leave it and pick up in its place something unfamiliar in which we are, once again, a neophyte. Kindy. Junior school. Intermediate. High School. University. Job. Job. Job. Job. Yet another job. Yet another one still.

Every ending is a little death. The way we relate to the world ends along with our comfortable pattern and we flounder around for a while in a context which is incrementally bigger, more complex and more challenging than the last one and is therefore simultaneously freeing, exciting and frightening.

A plethora of endings sit on my horizon, so as I look at closing off a long series of life chapters I have a particular sympathy for Noah as he closes off his first. For him, his world is expanding.

For me too.

It's an odd thing, that as all that once shaped my life sputters to a gradual halt, the universe has never seemed more miraculous, more welcoming, more beautiful, more full of purpose and meaning, more gobsmackingly huge and powerful. I find myself filled with a new, indefinable yearning which makes itself conscious as an attraction to those experiences and relationships which draw me closer to the heart of all things. And a correspondingly growing sense of ennui with those which are, instead, just part of the obfusticating cloud. Much of what made up the last few stages of my life has lost a lot of its gloss. And as it ends I find myself confronted by, bundled up by, transported off by a will which is so much bigger and more compassionate and kinder than mine

I appear to be enrolled in some kind of kindy, also.

Comments

Kate said…

Lovely ideas. Don't forget to take your metaphorical shilling tied up in a corner of your hanky.

6 August 2016 at 10:05

Merv said…

Kia ora, +Kelvin.
You have reminded me of a motto from my days in Every Boys Rally: 'Live for others for it is the way of adventure."
It seems to me you have & surely yet will live such an adventurous life.

6 August 2016 at 10:20

Kelvin Wright said…

And that's a lovely thought too. In my family of origin we had precious few shillings, certainly none that could be wasted by tying them up in the corners of hankies. And, now, for me that seems like a lesson generously bestowed at the outset of my life. Mtt 10:9 :)

6 August 2016 at 12:13

Nancy Barnard Starr said…

Thanks, +Kelvin. I don't remember kindy much, just making mud pies. Delicious! And imprinted with my hands.

6 August 2016 at 18:28

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