The End as Beginning
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice.
What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.
― T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding, the final poem of The Four Quartets
As this year comes to a close, I breathe a sigh of relief. At the sun dappling through my butter-yellow curtains after weeks of rain and dreariness. At my fingers agile on the keyboard after sporadic cramping from the arthritis my mother passed on to me. At clear thought after relentless congestion for weeks had convinced me of endless brain fog. At thankfulness that my husband’s chest pains had been determined to be gallstones and cleared up by a simple procedure. Life can go on, much as it always has, its rhythm waxing and waning with possibilities. So many ends.
This has been a mixed bag of a year, about evenly mixed with joys and upheavals. As always, I am my biggest challenge as I plod ahead stubbornly, making mistakes and anguishing for days about what I should have done instead. Forgiveness eventually comes, but never easily or quickly. The people in my life remind me of accomplishments, both small and large, with the most profound being a company I started 19 years ago sold this past year, allowing me the freedom I need to pursue my writing career full-time. I realize this is huge. I well remember juggling family, work, and mountains of minutiae every day. The computer, or pen and paper, becomes a constant niggling voice while we are attentive to those responsibilities we are, well, responsible for. And we wouldn’t have it any other way. We must simply keep moving forward, juggling fast and sure until we reach an ending we can live with, whether it be a completed chapter, a new insight for a stale narrative, even a decision to cut words or sections. Some type of conclusion that allows the starting point of something new. Fresh and hopeful.
As I continue the rewrite of my book, I embrace the milestone of a new decade as a new beginning for this labor of love that often feels like an albatross. I offer the words of my favorite poet, because he, like me, suffered from bouts of doubt and relentless self-criticism. And yet his shining glory is his final work The Four Quartets. And it is in the fourth and final poem Little Gidding, where we get our quote: to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. His writings often reflected a pessimistic view of modern man. Yet, underneath his waistcoat of despair, he also cradled the feathers of hope.
I love the analogy of hope as a feather; light and wispy, yet adamantly resilient. I need this hope, more so because I’m writing about family I dearly love and respect. Yet, I have to write honestly. Remember, though, it is from my perspective. Denials are expected; I have already heard words of caution. What I can do is attempt compromise without compromising the truth as I understand it. A tough challenge it will be. So I’m thankful for this milestone, the year that brought in doubt and anguish, buffeted by the gift of having the time to reassess and redo. The end is where I’m starting from.
