Beginning, Ending, Beginning Again

Location: Sacred Valley

Week: 38

Days Travelled: 258

As I come to the end of this globetrotting journey, I have perhaps inevitably begun thinking about the nature of cycles in our lives. 

So often, time moves through and around us in such a subtle way we barely notice it. If you’re anything like me, you perhaps don’t think you age - constantly surprised to find the younger getting older, all the while creeping up in years you hardly feel yourself. 

Similarly, we put effort into creating something we want in our life (a university degree, a job, a house, a trip) and hardly stop to take stock of what we have achieved before that dream morphs, without any real conscious attention, into the next step we must achieve. 

Just after we arrive home, my partner and I are also getting married. Intimate relationships, in both my social circles and work as a therapist, is one of the most important elements and greatest pain points in many people’s lives. For many people, marriage can be seen as the culmination of a relationship; the perhaps misguided perspective that we have achieved something in getting married. 

Personally, I see our wedding as both an ending and a new beginning. It is the end of who we are individually and how we see ourselves collectively for the remainder of our lives. I recognise many people no longer believe in the institution, but for us there is something sacred in the ritualised coming together in a way we have been ‘practicing’ for the past five years. 

Our trip, something we have also been planning, saving for and now doing for about four years is also coming to an end; a marvellous chapter filled with adventure, insight, joy and exploration. In my life, it feels like a significant juncture - a consideration of who I was before and after this past year and how I want my life to look from now on. 

Then there is the minutiae, the fact that every single moment is, in and of itself, an ending and beginning. Our innate and necessary experience of time - or perhaps lack thereof - can force us to forget how anything that has previously happened in our past exists as much as we carry it. Of course some experiences, both traumatic and wonderful, leave a greater imprint on our memory than others; sticky fingerprints on the bannisters we use to support ourselves along the stairways of our pasts. 

However, through conscious attention and effort we are able to let go of experiences, both big and small, until it becomes habit - our minds able to experience a moment fully and completely before letting it go to be present once again. This has certainly been my experience. 

For me coming home, I am ready to let go of the year that has been in order to experience what the life is asking of me. I feel excited to end one chapter in order to be able to write the next one; to put down the past and let the present dictate my future. 

Time to end an old beginning, and begin again. 

I hope these personal thoughts and experiences, like all my blogs, can be of use to you. For those in Melbourne, I will hopefully see you in class in the new year - or maybe at one of my offerings for 2025!