Shimbo Pastory
This article was published in the Writers Space Africa (WSA) Literary Magazine in January 2019
Have you wondered why we always celebrate ‘beginnings’? Is our optimism exaggerated? How much does the beginning guarantee the future? But at least it guarantees beyond reasonable doubt, the existence of the future. New days, months, years, come and go. We cannot discern much, just as we cannot design much.
Everything is said to happen in the beginning. The credit for a good thing goes to its beginning, and in the same, the failure of a bad one also is attributed to its beginning.
The joy of a new beginning does not come from what is begun, neither from the act nor from the process of beginning; of course, it is itself never clear until it grows to a somewhat independent adolescence.
The joy comes from the relief that we have passed a stage, the recognition of transcending from normalcy, the creation of historical fact. It is not a joy of reaching a step higher, but of leaving behind the familiar grounds.
The celebration of a new beginning therefore needs not to be a moment to celebrate passage of time, but rather of recalling and critiquing our maximization of utility in the previous phase of the natural provision we call time. How much has the old beginning impacted in us? Can the new beginning we joy over find hope in the old circumstances we ourselves have worked out?
An epochal wisdom by George Santayana reads: “Those who forget their histories are condemned for repeating the same.”
Lessons of the past should mark new beginnings of growth and progress. Otherwise, we are dumb to the question in John Donne’s verse: “… Tell me where all the past years are…”
At first, it all was beginning, of course, new, Holy Writs would say. But it will not stand so, all has got to grow. Life and the living, knowledge and the knowers, questions and the questioners, all about the same we rotate.
The story of a new beginning is the story of bettering old scripts. It is the story of smoothing down crooked alleyways and clearing windscreens; emptying one’s cup so that it can be filled once more.
It is the story of appreciating the wonder of limitation, lack and deficiency and setting up plans for improving them. It is a story of embracing new knowledge and discarding ungrounded preconceptions, biases and prejudices.
It is a story of retreat, resolution and change, employing new means to solve our ancient tight spots. It is a story of trying and testing the merits of the relationships we keep.
With new beginnings, life is full of smiles. Darkness enters when the new beginnings disease and strangle to death the very richness that nature and the Maker have deemed on the human person from the most primaeval of all beginnings. It is never too late for new gracious beginnings.
Bien cordialement.
