The Beginning of the End

“The beginning of the end” has, as a phrase, kind of a bad rep. It’s so ubiquitously linked to end-of-the-world-scenarios and countdowns to destruction and the resurrection of ancient evils long thought dead and what have you, that people tend to forget it’s honestly pretty unassuming and neutral. The beginning of the end might not mean the slow slide to the end times or the clock ticking down on your deteriorating relationships. It just means something distinct is about to come to a close, be it your last week of a job, the last book in a series you either love (in which case it’s bittersweet) or hate (in which case it’s long-awaited balm for your suffering sensibilities), or your final year of university.

The thing about degrees and internships and summer camps and holidays is that they’re all timed: as in, there’s a beginning and an end. You start at time A and, crucially, you know it ends (or should end) at time B. Obviously things may change, but you’re operating under a much clearer understanding of temporariness than with things like relationships or, well, life. You go in, you go through the process, you come out in the end with hopefully something to show for it (or not, especially with stuff like holidays. I don’t even come out feeling rested.), like those equation machine drawings they sometimes use in sixth grade maths to teach you how they work. It’s a clear-cut process, start here, end here, bye. It should be simple to process and the beginning of the end should not catch you like a deer in the headlights still wearing its deer pyjamas.

But here we are.

The end will come someday, and the slide (let’s say it’s a slide) towards it starts out as a distant figure, a blip in the horizon, so you don’t bother giving it that much attention, you’ll get there when you get there. And then one day you’re already tipping into the slide, and you try to find your bearings while you feel like you need to look at everything twice as hard to remember it. It can be abrupt and scary and exhilarating and many other things, but it is never intrinsically bad. You’re not heading towards the ultimate end; your slide isn’t going to stop at a brick wall hungry for bone fractures or electric shocks if it’s of the plastic tunnel kind. You’ll just stand back up and keep walking, maybe a little dizzy or winded but the ending wasn’t bad. It was just a slide, and you always knew it was out there on the horizon. Even if you weren’t focused on it or pursuing it, it was always there, and the entire point was to reach it one day-

That’s why the beginning of the end is so important.  It’s your chance to realise where you are, take a good look, draw a final breath, and understand you’re approaching a conclusion. It’s that final moment of acceptance and understanding that things will be different once you reach the end of that slide, but you recognise that it’s there. The beginning of the end shouldn’t just be a portent of destruction, the top of the slide isn’t a plunge into the abyss.

It’s an omen of change, not doom.