Today Is Not The End, It’s The Beginning
The sadness, personal and collective, is still palpable but today you wake up with the feeling of wanting — no, needing — to be better, to make change. All the time you’ve spent hemming and hawing about the kind of person you want to be but hesitating, for unexplained reasons, to make the (probably quantum) leap — today is the day you begin the becoming.
Today is the day you become.
That is significant. Back and forth like a pendulum you’ve swung from extreme to extreme: from solitude to socialite, from abstinence to indulgence, from obsession to hate, from passionate to lackluster. Today is the day you learn how to take refuge in balance. Today you step away from burning and freezing and learn what it takes to maintain the gentle warmth you’ve only ever glimpsed.
If today isn’t an end, and it isn’t, then it is a beginning. What will you start? Don’t let the answer be nothing and don’t let it be anything; make sure it is something exact, something big. Today is the day for starting something big.
All the things you’ve wanted to do, all the things you’ve wanted to say, all the places you’ve wanted to go, all the things you’ve wanted to see, all the beauty you’ve wanted to make, all the things you’ve wanted to be… go fucking be them already.
What’s stopping you? You will say time and money.
But I say today is the day you transcend time and money. It seems impossible but you have what it takes in you to do the impossible — and that’s the only place “what it takes” can be found, in you. The endless source of energy and spirit and passion and love that it takes is inside of yourself. It isn’t in a book, it isn’t in a new outfit, it isn’t in a political debate, it isn’t in a post-graduate education, and it most definitely isn’t in a lover like we all ignorantly believe. You have to get out of the external and travel inside. It’s dark and scary and uncomfortable, yes — but that’s how you know it is right. (Growth is uncomfortable before it is favorable.) You’ve been running from these dark places and the ghosts that occupy them for years; today is the day you take them out for drinks and try to understand them. Today is the day you fall for your daemons, with what haunts you. Because only when you learn to love your dark can you begin to shine your light, and only when you shine your light can you begin becoming, and only when you begin becoming can you be consistently alive and in love — the kind of person you’ve always wanted to be.
Today is the day you are brave and sit alone in the cold black night with your fears; tomorrow the sun will rise and you will be warm.