“Just think: if you’d been here when all of this first started – if you’d seen all the lava flowing and the mountains pushing up – you would have thought the end of the world had come. But really it was just the beginning.”
Right now, I’m sitting at my desk thinking about how much I dislike the phrase “new chapter of my life,” especially when it’s preceded by the clause “so excited to start this”. The cliché rings with all the hollow triteness of a million social media posts sent in unison, full of pomp and noise, possessing no real substance.
Lives are not novels. Novels are planned with a reader in mind; their chapters are substructures intended to facilitate comprehension. Chapters simplify things. They break the longer text into discrete, digestible fragments. Lives are not so. Lives are complicated and random. Beginnings and endings often bleed into one another, linger, fester, taper off. Consider a failing relationship neither person wants to end, so it slowly dwindles to nothingness. Though the finale of the relationship may be concrete, the start of its decline remains murky and mysterious. “Where did it all go wrong?” we wonder. The truth is, there was no starting point to this chapter. The decline was the result of a slow accumulation of many factors – less time, fragmented attention, loss of interest – and conceiving of it as a chapter only fuels our suffering.
Another reason chapters suck is because it sucks when you feel like you’re between them. It’s listless, disempowering, uncertain. But even these moments are chapters, and we think of them as such -- boring, skippable filler with no point or fruitfulness. This is a harmful mentality. The present moment is all there is. When we give ourselves the freedom to be at peace with it, when we relinquish the chapter-based model of thinking, we gain insight and contentment.
And yet, I can’t resist. Here I am at the end of the college chapter of my life, sitting at my keyboard, wishing I could stop thinking of my life as discrete fragments, getting nowhere. There’s a weirdness to being at the end. I’ve been in school for pretty much my entire life. I was good at it. I liked it. I liked it so much that after my first week of college, I wrote the most naive, doe-eyed, saccharine post about how deeply I loved it. (I still feel the same Wei.) But here I am at the end of all that, wondering if I’ll ever feel the same. Will my life slowly wither as I get up at 6 in the morning to beat traffic, put on a suit, work a corporate 9 to 5, get takeout on the drive home because I’m too exhausted to make dinner? Or will my life ignite as I work on meaningful projects, impact the things I care about, fuel my talents and ambitions? Has the end of something wonderful come? Or is it really just the beginning?
(January 2020 update: It was just the beginning.)
