As our lives change, there is a need to break off the things you were doing before, to make room for your new way of life. It’s incredibly common: people start new jobs, new relationships, and new chapters of their lives, almost constantly, depending on how you craft the particular narrative you are interested in making about your own life. This seems to be a fairly common practice for many people: we focus on the new way our life will take shape, and then decide what part of our old life still fits into the way things are now.
This week has been spent playing catch-up, for sure, and I’m still not fully there. “Things” are afoot, and as I learn the new steps of this dance, I’m far less close to the parts of the ballroom I once frequented, where plenty of previous chapters of my life all happened. I’m still trying to figure out what I can still reach here, and where those things will fit into these new dance steps that are very new to me.
I’ve always been good at starting things, but wrapping up a chapter has always been challenging for me. I feel like I never know exactly how to “land” the story until well after I already have, and the urge to go back and do it right this time often leaves me to either freeze up, never end things, or worse, overthink the ending to the point where it only makes sense to me. Perhaps this is a portent of how difficult future endings will be, but certainly, it makes me wonder why ends are like this. Saying goodbye, graduations, transitions. All of these things seem to be common experiences for almost everyone, and yet, they seem more difficult than almost anything else.
As I pirouette around the close of some chapters and as I two-step my rewrite on others in this new mixed-metaphor book / dance I’m trying to learn, I wonder: what part of all of this will feel like it needs a revision in five years, and which parts will I finally come to terms with, regardless of how it all turns out?
Austin Rich 