The end is the beginning is the end...

I watched the movie "Synecdoche, NY" recently, and besides being a total mind trip, there was a line in it that really stood out to me: the end is built into the beginning.

I believe that. I believe that everything ends, as Death Cab's latest single so gracefully tells me. I was born, and the act of being born inherently presupposes the act of dying at some future date. Sometimes death itself is what ends something. Not all things are ended during the course of someone's life, but death unequivocally signals the end of a thousand beginnings.

I also believe that the reverse is true: beginnings come from endings. And what makes this side of the coin so amazing is that the beginning often times includes struggle. Being born is difficult, but it takes a baby from being, in its basest definition, a parasite, to an autonomous being. When we hurt, when we don't understand, when we are confused...these are uncomfortable, challenging times of struggle. And they make us who we are.

If we choose to just "get through" the hard times, we really cheat ourselves out of learning what they have to teach us. At the end of my life, I hope to look back and say I lived every moment of it. I want to look back and see very few moments that I simply endured because they were uncomfortable. I want to say that I took every lesson presented to me and at least learned something - something about myself, something about God, something about others. And those lessons very often come during the times when we would rather hurt and feel pitied and overcome. Those feelings are valid, and should be acknowledged, but they should not consume us. Life never stops, despite our feelings that the world is over, that it has ended. Our previous world has perhaps ended, but our present world, our new world, is just being born. By learning to embrace that moment of change for what it is, it will be much easier to maintain joy - a sense of peace and contentment that goes beyond the immediate circumstances of life.

In the last month or so, this message of joy that surpasses circumstance has really been hammered into me from all angles. I may never fully understand it, but I will continue to try. I will embrace the endings that are beginnings.