Beginnings and Endings

I'm currently taking Firefly Creative Writing's online Coming Home to Writing course – for the second time. It's the kind of course that I could take an infinite number of times and ​I think I would ​get something more out of it each time.

In last week's class, our facilitator, Chris Kay Fraser, distributed her awesome Life C​ycle of Creative Projects. We discussed it as a class and ​I found it very interesting to see the many similar and different takes people have on the process. (If you're interested in exploring this yourself, I encourage you to take the class!)
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As a second-timer, I've seen the Life C​ycle before, but this time through, It led me ​in​to an epiphany about my process and about myself.

I hate beginnings and endings

The stuff in the middle is all cool. I love all the ideas and chaos and the processes of writing and editing. But I hate the fallow stage before a project and I hate the process of finishing a project and rendering it up to the world.

This holds true in my life as well. I love living my life and I don't mind tweaking things here and there, but starting and ending – jobs, relationships, homes – makes me feel crazy. Just ask anyone I've ever dated if the first two weeks were not stupidly insane and insanely stupid? So much so that many people have opted out after the first date or two​. (Or I have run like hell – anything to escape feeling so awkward).

Once I get over that initial ​hump, I don't do too badly, but getting in​to a relationship is hard – it stirs up so many difficult emotions.

And endings, well, I tend to drag those out – desperately postponing inevitable changes.

Given my life experiences, these tendencies make sense. My infancy was crappy, much of it spent in the hospital. Not a pleasant beginning. The first major ending I experienced was the break-up of my parents' marriage and the upheaval of ​our family when I was 7​.​ Also not fun.

So, my initial experiences with beginnings and endings were difficult. I was too young to make any sense of them, so instead I developed other strategies: a tendency to try to​ JUMP over beginnings and to DRAG out endings. My aversion to major transitions has led me to make some poor life decisions when my avoidance of beginnings or endings overruled my desire for what I wanted or muffled my understanding of what was right for me.

This feels like a challenging pattern to try to change.

Cultivating love and grace in beginnings and endings

I saw this meme on Facebook this week:*​

From https://www.flickr.com/photos/kaysha/9641391266/
​*Please note that according to fakebuddhaquotes.com,
this quote was not actually spoken by Buddha – it is adapted
from Jack Kornfield’s Buddha’s Little Instruction Book.​

It strikes me that I live pretty gently as long as I'm in the middle of things. But in beginnings, I fail to love (embrace, welcome) and during endings, I fail to have grace (I clutch, I balk).​

So here is work for me to do – learn how to relax into beginnings and endings. To cultivate more love and more grace. There are more beginnings coming (hopefully) and definitely more endings, (including the ​BIG ending: Death).

​It's never too soon or too late to work for internal changes that cultivate greater peace and open up more opportunities.