New Beginnings?
To ‘Start’ is not to Begin
It’s Spring, the season of the year characterized by death and rebirth accompanied by different festivals according to beliefs you may hold. Strictly speaking it starts at the Spring Equinox or Ostara when the lengths of night and day are equal – usually March 20th, but the times of celebration move around according to different beliefs.
Now, rather than the artificial start of the year on January 1st is the time to make a new ‘start’, for a ‘rebirth’ or for your egg to hatch.
‘Start from the beginning’ or ‘at the beginning’ doesn’t work.
It’s back to front thinking, like saying ‘back to basics’ when you really mean ‘forward to basics’ (thanks for that from Peter Thompson).
You see, whatever we do doesn’t happen until we start.
Consider a race, whether it be horses, athletics or Formula One. The start is the start. Lights going out, flags being dropped or guns going off.
The start is followed by the beginning. It’s just a moment which leads to the beginning phase of the race or whatever it is.
If you’re starting a business or a relationship or whatever, the beginning, not the start, is where it succeeds or fails, where it survives or dies.
It’s the same with birth. Arrival on this planet is where we start this life. And some, like my first brother who died at eighteen months, don’t make it past the beginning.
There’s no fixed or predetermined length for the beginning. As my accountancy teacher at Warwick Business School used to say frequently, “It depends.”
It depends on what it is you started, and it carries on until you reach a point of stability. When you know the beginning has finished and whatever it was you started has become established.
It then goes on until it reaches an ‘endgame’, which in terms of the race I used for the start example is a predetermined point – but in other things such as a business or relationship, it isn’t. It’s when you feel or believe (or someone else does, although this may not match with you) it’s time to stop.
And like the beginning, the ‘endgame’ has no fixed duration until you reach the point where it finally stops. Again, like the start, this is a moment. When it stops, it stops.
End of.
There may be a few things which happen afterwards, but they weren’t part of the enterprise itself. Just a wrap-up or add-on or further development when you start again to carry on building your position in the particular enterprise involved.