The End is Just Another Beginning
Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/pages-on-an-opened-book-415071/
Last week, I finished a novel I’d been reading and closed the book for the last time. And I found myself floating.
The story had everything: rich characters, an interesting plot that both met and subverted my expectations, and meaningful payoffs for the characters.
Soon after shutting the book, I wanted more: to dive back into the story or another like it and experience the feeling of being enthralled by fictional characters’ lives once again.
This is a feeling I’ve chased since I was a little boy falling in love with reading.
This is a feeling that made me want to be a storyteller; I wanted to give other people the same experience that I love.
There’s nothing quite like the feeling of finishing a good story. It tends to make you think for a time; it sticks with you, sometimes appearing in your dreams or daily experiences. It makes you consider the growth arcs that various characters completed, and it makes you think about where your “character arc” currently is.
It makes you wonder about the author, too: how they came up with the ideas, how much time they spent putting them together like pieces of a model kit, how they probably had a love/hate relationship with the story they were constructing, and how their own lives shaped the narrative. What amuses and puzzles me is that every author talks about the journey to writing their books differently. The rules of creative writing I learned about in college often appear to be more like “guidelines”, in the words of Barbossa from Pirates of the Caribbean.
Above all, though, as a writer and aspiring book author myself, reading a good story makes me want to be even better at my craft.
There’s nothing like being able to captivate an audience with your words, just as there’s nothing like being captivated by a storyteller. Stories shape us, and we’re often shaped without even realizing it because of the sheer number of stories we tell each other.
As storytelling humans, we spend much of our time trying to reach the end of whatever journey we’re currently on. We expect such endings to change our lives in some way.
For instance, right now I’m on a journey of education to become an ordained minister. I can’t quite tell what my life will look like once that journey is complete, but I know a new beginning of some sort will take place.
As long as we’re alive, each milestone—each ending of a journey we were on—is merely a brief rest stop on the way to the next one. That feeling of finishing a good story makes me want to do one of two things: return to the story if that’s an option (like in a book series), or dive into a new story that will make me think and feel a similar way.
This is a natural part of our psyche; beginnings and endings are necessary. They happen every single day. Healthy people pursue goals to obtain them and complete a journey (or a side quest, to use videogame terminology), then begin another one.
A marker of maturity is that the journeys we complete and things we achieve teach us along the way to be better, kinder, humbler, more social, less selfish, more gracious, and more loving people who can see past the ends of our noses.
We need endings because they lead to new beginnings; they’re an assurance that life will continue even after fulfilling the goal. Even modern stories about “the end of the world” are usually about what comes after the world supposedly ends. It’s like we can’t fathom a story just being over. Our relentless curiosity as a species prevents us from stopping in our tracks—unless for some reason we’ve become stuck, and therefore unhappy.
So no matter what stage of your journey you’re on, remember to be at least somewhat present for it, because we don’t live in endings or beginnings: we live in media res, between the past and the future. And sometimes that means living between the back cover of one book and the front cover of another. Because each ending is just another beginning.