It is not *the* beginning, but it is *a* beginning.
One of my favourite things to do, at the start or end of an experience I am leading, particularly a group experience, is to quote Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time.
Each book opens with a similar set piece. A gust of wind starts to blow, blowing across the world setting the scene for the book ahead and giving the author the chance to remind us what is happening in the many corners of his epic story.
Somewhere in those opening passages, he writes something like this: ‘The gust of wind was not the beginning, because there are no beginnings or endings on the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.’
That’s what every beginning (and ending) of a group programme is like. It’s not the beginning, because at some point before that, people decided to join the programme. Or the programme was conceived in the mind of someone. Or the need for the programme was noticed. But it is a beginning, and one worth marking.
At the end of leadership programmes I lead, often the final workshop doesn’t have everyone there. (People deal with endings in different ways, of course - some by not showing up for them, often with good reason.) So in some ways it’s not the end, because the end was the last time everyone was there. And it’s not the end because many of the participants may well see each other again. But it is an ending, and one worth marking.
Our lives are like this. We mark the beginning, say, of a life. And that is a beginning. But is it really the beginning? Or did the journey that includes the birth of that person perhaps begin when the sperm met the egg? Or, later than that but earlier than birth, when some part of the brain came online, or some part of its physiology developed enough that we know, finally, that this life will manage to grow into a person who is born?
Even before the sperm meets the egg, though. Does the journey begin when the two people decide to have a child (if they do)? Or when it becomes inevitable, in the way that things sometimes do in relationships, in lives, that they will decide? Is it, really, foretold earlier than that?
It is not the beginning. But it is a beginning, and one worth marking.
Our lives can feel linear, can feel controlled. Until we really slow down to think about it. The chaos of complexity, whirling about us. Where there are no beginnings and no endings, and everything somehow seems to cause and be caused by everything else.
Where the winds blow, and all we can do is sail with them.
The waves roll and at best we can surf them.
The tides turn and we can only hope we aren’t in the wrong place at the wrong time.
And through all this the things we do… they do matter.
Not, perhaps, as much as we would like.
Not as much as our worries tell us they do… ‘Get this right, and your life depends on it…’
But they do matter.
These small decisions and movements we make.
The decision and movement, which send the currents swirling in a slightly different way around us, which means they swirl slightly differently somewhere further away. And who knows what that was the beginning of. Well, a beginning of.
All these moments making the life of a human.
Run in part by the wheel and winds of time.
Run in part by the subconscious actions driven by evolution and the sum of our experiences.
Run in part by our conscious decisions.
And even if they only make a small difference in the sea of everything, they do make a difference.
And so we have to keep sailing, keep surfing, keep positioning ourselves for if the tides turn.
Keep choosing.
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This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.
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