Screams and grunts filled the air, and beneath them the unmistakable sounds of pain.  The Marisan scout cursed the thorn that had crippled her foot, she cursed the forest her company had been in for the better part of the month, and she cursed whatever fates had conspired to put her people in this sickening war.  Just when she thought she was used to it, the gurgle of a dying acquaintance would serve as a grisly reminder of the Maggites’ brutality. It was almost better when they were already dead. She loathed having to leave a wounded comrade behind, seeing the desperation in their eyes, having to turn away with a cruelty that caught her in the gut every time. She hated what the Maggites had forced her to become.

She tried to take her mind off the pain and paused for a ritual prayer to Marisa.  But it felt artificial.  She no longer drew any pleasure from the Sun, not when its light shone so indifferently.  It was hard to focus.  She thought involuntarily of her boy back home and his innocent face.  She knew her husband would be taking care of him, teaching him the arts and histories, but she couldn’t help thinking that their once proud culture had been irreparably tainted by this violence, and she felt a surge of pity for her child and what kind of life he would have, under the dark clouds of the Maggite threat.

* * *

The Maggite hunter took another step and paused, waiting for the wind.  This was an exercise in patience, as were so many things in life.  She was hunting during the day, not out of preference but out of determination to catch up to her quarry, a near-invisible Marisan that had been bringing death and fear to this edge of the woods for three weeks.  They had tracked down most of the intruders but the leader had always escaped.  The hunter felt disgusted at the Marisan’s dedication to her mission.  That coward had left her comrades to suffer instead of allowing them the mercy of a quick death.  She had to be stopped at any cost, and eventually, she would be – by Maggie’s grace.

The wind had shifted back, and she took another step.  Her target was bleeding, probably from the foot, and it made it easy to track her.  The only challenge was retaining the element of surprise.  If it were night, under Maggie’s quiet watch it would be easy.  Damn this blinding yellow light.  But, oh – what was that?  She drew her bow and moved forward quietly.  She allowed a small smile as she aimed at the slight figure in the distance.  But just then, the sun broke through the branches and she saw the expression on the Marisan’s face.  Something in that expression made her pause, and in that second the wind changed.  When the arrow reached her enemy it hit her shoulder instead of her neck.  The next second the Marisan was gone.

Damn!  She drew another arrow and fired it where she thought the sunlover might have taken cover.  She started running in the direction of her first shot, taking the most direct route she could without being suicidal. The shifting rays of light threw confusing shadows and she blinked  in anger.  By the time she heard the twang of a bow from her left, she only had time to dive headfirst into the dirt.  She struggled to free her knife as a shapeless form came at her from her peripheral vision.  Throwing out her legs she kicked out hard and made contact.  She got to her feet, knife drawn, and stood face to face with a completely alien bloodstreaked face.  She felt chilled to the bone as she swung her knife way too carelessly. A quick chop to her wrist caused her to drop it, and then she was fighting for her life, dodging blows, countering kicks and looking for some kind of opening she could use to win, or escape.  The strange thing, she thought as her punch missed again, was that their fighting styles were so similar.  She could almost anticipate the next move of her opponent, and she felt a deep certainty that her opponent’s uncanny anticipation of her own attacks was the reason they were in this ridiculous stalemate.  She looked in the Marisan’s face and realized her expression was probably identical.  In that eerie moment of looking into a mirror, she saw something almost familiar.  The next thing she saw was a fist approaching her jaw, and everything went black.

* * *

She finished stoking the fire and walked back to her prisoner, who was beginning to regain consciousness.  She was worried that she hadn’t gotten farther from the scouted zones but she was more worried about getting lost in the dark.  The lake at least would provide water and limit the approach of anyone who might have been following them.  She winced at her aching foot and stiff shoulder, and wondered again why she hadn’t left the ghastly-looking Maggite dead in the forest. Right on cue, she heard the Maggite growl.

“Release me, Marisan.”

“I’m more likely to kill you, after I find out the location and strength of your army in this area.”

“You must be joking.  You’ve been all over these woods for the past month, you probably know better than I do.  What do you really want?”

“Very well, my cheery moonbeam.  What I want to know is how you were able to block all my attacks back there.  It was as if you’ve been fighting me all my life.”

“Hah.  That’s what you dragged me here for?  To ask me about my martial arts training?  You should have much greater concerns, such as death.  In fact, with those wounds, you better eat something if you want to survive the night.”

“Marisans do not eat by moonlight.  Meals are a time for pleasure and companionship, to be shared by friends under the benevolent light of the sun.”

“Who told you that, your daddy?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“What wouldn’t I understand?”

“Everything.  Why I refuse to eat by moonlight, why we are fighting this war.”

“And why are we fighting this war?”

Her voice rose angrily, “Do I need to remind you of the great betrayal?  Do they teach you nothing in that forsaken place you call home?  Once our people were just as you are, with no sense of morality or decency. We were like animals. Then we met Marisa.  She taught us how to grow our own food, how to keep track of time, how to record our histories and take pride in them.  She taught us how to live…until the darkness came.  When she was taken from us it was all we could do to survive.  We looked to the sky and saw her memory there, and resolved to always honor it.”

There was silence for a moment.

“Remarkable how similar that story is to the truth.  But it was Maggie who was sucked into the sky and taken from us. Marisa gave us nothing.  It was Maggie who taught us how to keep track of time, how to find food in winter, how to navigate the seas…and now, now we can only look up and curse the sun that chases her out of the sky.”

“And so we are locked in eternal struggle, as are they,” the Marisan sighed.

“You sound like my sister.”

“In another life, I could have been.  I think that, but for circumstance, your people and mine might have turned out quite similarly.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

The Marisan stared across the fire.  “Inside everyone there is both that which we love and that which we hate.  Is it so hard to believe that our two peoples might have once shared the same goal, and might still again?”

“Is that why you’re keeping me here?  To indoctrinate me with this propaganda?”

“I brought you here because I saw myself in you, and I know you saw yourself in me, back there in the forest.  Isn’t it funny?  We’re two sides of the same coin!  We’re twins, you and I, twins who’ve lost their parents.  We’ve been blaming that loss on each other for generations.”

The Maggite was silent for a while, but when she spoke, it was with a new tone.  “I’ve always wondered at the assumption that Maggie and Marisa were chasing each other around the sky.  It might be that when Maggie is tired, Marisa takes over.  It might be that they are like partners, companions for each other in those lonely heavens.”

“It might be that they are the same person with two names, and that’s why they are never seen together at the same time.”

“Who are we to say?  There’s no way to know for sure.”

“We are the only ones who can say.  Marisa and Maggie are silent now. There are no more divine absolutes, the closest we can come are convictions and beliefs.  And I believe that I met you for a reason.”  The Marisan rubbed her shoulder and gave a sad smile.  “I don’t pretend to hope that things will change between us.  But it is some small consolation that perhaps I have been lucky enough to meet the sister I never thought I had.”

She put out the fire and untied the ropes around the Maggite’s wrists and ankles.  “You have to go before it gets light and my company starts looking for me.  The road is on the other side of the lake.”

“Thank you,” the Maggite said.

Dawn had come, and the last of the stars faded behind the dim grey growing in the sky.  In the ambient light they walked the path by the lake that led to the crossroads, the pale Maggite with deliberate steps and the tan Marisan limping slightly. They did not speak, but when the Maggite stopped, the Marisan did too. They stared side by side into the swirling water, and to their eyes, only one reflection gazed back at them.

I spend a lot of my life accumulating knowledge, bent on knowing and understanding all I can.  But sometimes it seems as if each new bit of information comes at the price of a tiny bit of wonder and mystery.

I’m not advocating blissful ignorance, but there is something intriguing and even thrilling about a mystery, and about the unknown.  About exploring without a map.  Sometimes, the excitement is in the problem-solving aspect of figuring out a puzzle.  Other times my perception of something unknown is just different than when it is fully understood.  For example, listening to a song without being able to make out the lyrics brings out the sound of the words without the distraction of meaning.  Once I know the words, the song becomes more of a message and it’s hard to think of it in the same way.  Everything it was is tainted and colored by this new information.  Something is lost in that moment of understanding that is hard to get back.

Maybe it’s imagination that is sacrificed.  Old magic being told that it goes against the laws of physics, elves and fairies slowly being hunted to extinction or forced to sail away forever in the face of the intractable reason of man.  Perhaps when these fantasies are shattered, they leave us stranded in the mundanity of everyday life.  Or maybe it is hope that’s being lost: the people who left their homes and countries to settle somewhere else, not knowing what they’d find but dreaming of something different.  Maybe after all, it’s just lost innocence, replaced by that grown-up responsibility and accountability that keeps us from going back to never-never land.

I think it’s the case that no matter how enjoyable it is to be swept along in the wondrous currents of the mysterious, if we want to affect the world instead of just observing it, we must and should understand it.  Obviously when I listen to a song I don’t always try to analyze it.  It’s just a shame sometimes that if I wanted to learn how to play it myself, that haunting melody would becomes a series of minor chord changes, with a quantified rhythm and timbre, written down on a page.

Surely, surely, no amount of language communication can ever truly bridge the gap between my mind and another.  Not only will I never know what someone else thinks or feels, but I can’t even be sure if their concept of a given word is the same as mine.

In fact, the world could look very different to me than to everyone else, and I would never really be able to tell.  I don’t see how objectifying to more and more descriptive vocabulary will do any good when the simplest of terms remain incomprehensible.

Love is a complex emotion and not very well understood.  It’s too subtle a way to communicate.  You might as well be kissing a mirror, because the only emotion there is what you extrapolate must be there based on your own experience.  It’s hardly shared at all.

Extremely primal emotions may be transferable, I’ll grant you that.  If someone lunges at me with a knife I have a pretty good idea what’s going on.  But it’s so caricatured!  Happiness, well that’s out of the question.  Sorrow is too, come to think of it.  How many different kinds of sadness are there, all represented with a facial expression and increased lacrimation?

No, fear is out of the question.  Yes, I agree it’s possibly the simplest notion to transf- no!  You of all people should know what we’re trying to do here.  We need to build support, not give people flashbacks to a bad episode of The Twilight Zone.

Curiosity?  Hm.  Now you’re talking.  By its very definition it precludes specific knowledge or attitude.  Okay, maybe not attitude.  But still, I like it.  Curiosity for its own sake would certainly have widespread relatability.  Haha, well that just goes to show how we use the word certainly differently.  Curiosity…well, it is fitting.  Let’s do it.  Hurry, there isn’t much time.

Engage the telepathic co-processors.  Bring the feedback algorithms online.  Haha, yes, yes, it’s possible we’re sharing something at this very moment.  If all goes well we might know soon enough.  Hell, if all goes wrong I still won’t regret it.  Don’t you see the magnitude of this?  One day there were no directed radio waves on Earth, the next day there were.  And this, this is so much more than radio.  This is humanity.  What?  We’re not going to be turning people into the Borg, for god’s sake.  A song can still have two meanings for two people, they just might be able to share what that feeling is.  I don’t care if it’s a hundred years down the line.  I’m sure they’ll legislate like there’s no tomorrow.  But there won’t be any stopping it, you’ll see.  To really know, if only for an instant, that you’re not alone.  Imagine!  For millenia we have existed in silence, in darkness, drifting like ghosts driven by a haunting need for something indescribable, passing each other without recognition.  It’s time to light a match and have a look around.  Of course there’ll be a way to turn it off.  I promised you that.

It was a weird and telling scene
But not too strange for Hallowe’en:
The woman glared with angry face
But husband laughed without a trace
Of worry or remorse or care -
To see that woman standing there
Brought him no pain nor grey in hair.

And then she thought she hated him,
That madman with his cheshire grin.
She’d suffered long and long enough
Enough, she thought, enough, enough!
Of course it hadn’t been like this
At the beginning of their bliss
A thrilling tryst, his loving kiss
How had it ever come to this?

And now again, All Hallow’s Eve
His flying hair, that dancing fool!
Was it too much to ask of him
To behave well, to keep his cool?
Uncaringness she could believe,
But more and more he seemed to drift
Through life on whimsy and on whim
While her own spirits would not lift.

Her heart had long since turned to ice,
Its freezing grip chilled to the bone
His dance a gruesome revelry
In sins which he could not atone
But she would stop this devilry
And grant him what he wanted most:
To flit about the world not live
But as a cursed spirit-ghost.

She drew her gun and thought it nice
That his last breath might just suffice
To melt the ice cube in her chest
And really, it was for the best.
She pulled the trigger with a blink
And as his grin began to sink
She saw how desperately he died
And terrified, she cried and cried.

Nothing is planned by the sea and the sand.

Jen’s shoes clack-clacked on the cracked sidewalk, her slight frame slipping in and out of the dimly buzzing shadows of the streetlights.  She looked around hesitantly and almost tripped.  “What the hell am I thinking,” she muttered to herself.  Most nights at this time, she would be in bed with a book, or at her favorite cafe nursing her usual and people-watching.  Tonight she had nothing to distract her from herself.  It was a whim to head down to the beach, and the more she thought about it, it was probably a pretty dangerous adventure.  This time of year, the beach was deserted at night.  It was too cold, too windy, and too far away from the warmth of the city.  And yet, here she was, the result of another ill-thought-out decision based on a whiff of something reminiscent of sea salt and the thought of the full moon reflected on the waves.

Each block she walked had been another decision, whether to turn back or continue forward.  The possibility of making a mistake weighed on her almost tangibly.  Someone could come out of that dark alley and kill her, or worse.  If only she had turned back one block earlier, she would have been safe.  Maybe she’ll make it to the beach, only to find herself shivering and miserable, wishing she was anywhere else.  An eternity of consequences stretched out before her on the dimly lit sidewalk.  Consequences she would have to live with.  She thought of the endless life after being viciously beaten by a drunk mugger, crippled, disfigured, and unwanted.  She thought of the endless life after seeing the moonlight flit perfectly over the waves, trying in vain to find a scene as memorable.  She thought of the endless life on the sidewalk after deciding never to stop walking.  But lastly she thought of the endless life in her apartment, alone, afraid to leave or even get out of bed, unwilling to shoulder the burden of choice.  And she kept walking towards the slow hissing of the waves.  “Finally,” Jen blinked, kicking her heels off and stepping onto the dunes.  The moon was flitting prettily over the waves, and as she walked slowly towards the ocean she whispered it again: “Finally.”  She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and suddenly decided to make her stand right there, in the sea and the sand, and she wriggled her toes into the cold wetness and let the wind whip her hair in every direction.

When she opened her eyes, the djinn was standing in front of her.  He seemed ethereal, as though he might be blown away by the next gust of wind, and his clothes rustled so that she was unsure whether there was anything inside them.  His hair floated in defiance of gravity, but his face was human, and his gaze solid.  His eyes were the color of the sand and the sea, and she lost herself in them, in their timeless familiarity.  A long time passed.  When he spoke, it was as quiet and inevitable as the backyard brook destined after many miles to become a mighty waterfall.

“I have come to grant your wish.”

She exhaled.

The djinn said, “I have come to set you free.”

She blinked.

The djinn said, “I have come to take away your fear.”

She whispered, “How do you know I’m afraid?”

“Everyone is afraid,” he said with certainty.  “They do not know the future, nor do they usually know the past.  They do not know others, and they know themselves least of all.  Doubt is, perhaps, the foundation of all fear.”

“And you -”

“Grant their wishes, yes.”  He smiled knowingly as if reliving a thousand jokes.  “You see,” he chuckled, “they actually believe they know what they want!”  He laughed like faraway thunder.  “Some live to learn from their mistake, and others, well, aren’t so unlucky.”

Her feet were gripping the sand so hard it hurt.  She briefly entertained notions of crying, or falling dramatically to her knees, or laughing, or running, or kissing him.

“But I can see that you are not like most,” he continued.  “You are well aware of your fear, and it is not of me.  You are only afraid of choosing wrongly.  You are here, so you must understand the mortal gravity of that choice, and every other.  But perhaps you also understand its inevitability.”  He held up a hand.  “Near-inevitability.  For the one true gift I may give is the one I once received, escape from the prison of doubt and reprieve from the weight of uncertainty.”  He motioned at the waves crashing on the shore.  “This is the clarity of purpose I can provide.  You are adrift, but I can give you direction and a steady wind.  You will forever unerringly find your shore.”

She stared at the waves crashing, ebbing, and crashing again onto the beach.  She saw them rise to majestic heights, lose their balance, and yet land time after time in the same familiar sand, in the caress of an age-old lover.  It was very relaxing.

He said with sympathy, “You will no longer have to seek out this feeling, it will be inside you.”

And Jen looked in the djinn’s eyes and knew it to be true.  But then she bit her lip and looked back at the ocean.  “The waves must crash forever,” she said.  “If there are rocks, and a ship, the waves must crush it.”

“Yes, of course.  In the captain’s case, that is just one example of the fatal consequences of decision.”

“But what if the wave should want to carry the ship to safety?  What if one grain of sand should want to fly against the wind?”

“Why would it?  If grains of sand were not governed by wind we would not have the beauty of the sand dune.  There would be pointless chaos.”

“Not every grain, and not all the time.  Just enough to be different.  Just enough to make a difference.”

He stared at her and said nothing.

“If enough grains had that power,” she mused, “they could build their own sand castles.”

“Or they could destroy others’ sand castles.  Without a common purpose they would be doomed to an existence without greater meaning.  Even with a common purpose they will find themselves at the mercy of uncaring waves, and in the end, subject to the mortality of time itself.  No matter which road is taken, no matter which method is used, the sand castle will fall.  And nothing will remain but wasted effort.”

“And a memory.”

“Is a memory worth more than reality?”

“A memory is forever, reality is only one moment.”  She paused, and continued, “the eternity of consequences is not a curse, it’s a gift.  It’s what we remember that has meaning, not the moment itself.  Our fleeting effect on the world, for good or ill, is all that can define us.  Unlike some, we are blessed with the awareness of this and the ability to change.  How could I give that up?  That precious gift, that unique responsibility?  My own eternal life.”

The djinn smoldered.  He swayed back and forth.  “You will be unable to see out of your own special darkness.  You will make dire mistakes, and be haunted by them, long after you are dead.  He spread his hands to encompass the beach, the sea, the city, the universe.  There will be no safe or easy road for you to follow.”

And as the tear ran down her cheek she said with more confidence than she felt,  “I know.  I will make mistakes, and I will pay the price.  But this will not be one of them.”

The djinn’s sonorous tone had a tinge of desperation as he asked, “Where will you go?  What path will you take from here?  Who will you become?  How will you choose?”

Jen looked around her slowly, at the moon shimmering on the restless ocean, at the brightly lit city beyond the cracked sidewalk, at the blurry darkness on the horizon.  She wiped the tears from her face and smiled.  She took the djinn’s hand and said, “I don’t know, I’ve never done it before.”  And as she led him step by step into the sky, their eyes shining with more than moonlight, grains of wet sand clung to their feet only to drop and twist in the air, forming parapets and little towers on their long journey back to the earth.

The reason I like this video so much is the perfect synergy of music, drawings, and animation. The song is so perfectly synchronized with the animation and the story, that they make each other better than they would be on their own. There’s something natural about cartoons as art, because their simplicity makes them a natural metaphor, something already open to interpretation. And still they can be so expressive. Also, well, I’m a sucker for endings and this is a great one.

10 points for This American Life and 30 points each to Chris Ware, Andrew Bird, and John Kuramoto.

There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second can either go forward or fall back.  With a little luck it goes forward, and you win.  Or maybe it doesn’t.  And you lose.

Losing something is not an instantaneous process. It is the accumulation of uncountable choices, and perhaps not all of them were wrong. Yet the right choices are still coupled inextricably with the wrong ones when you look back at the result.  How far back was that one moment in time where your fate was sealed one way or the other?

When you realize you’ve lost something you may not have lost it yet.  There is still a chance it is at the last place you saw it.  It may seem unlikely, but admit it: there is a little hope there.   There’s a little anticipation as you retrace your steps down the branching tree of your decisions to the crucial root, that butterfly on the other side of the world.  There you might  find what you thought you had lost, and be thankful that your fright was just a fleeting premonition of what might have been.  Or you might find nothing, and realize that your hope was just a fleeting wish and you cannot, actually, travel back in time.

And yet we rarely attempt to go back in time and examine the choices leading up to our success.  Surely the path was just as fraught with danger, and yet there is no heady anticipation in re-examining that one afternoon ten years ago where you might have blown it all.  One would think that such analysis could be even more constructive than the simple avoidance of failure.

Of course, there are emotions at play.  For some reason, it is more thrilling to find your way back from the precipice of disaster, than to simply avoid going near the cliffs that day.  Perhaps this is because we have all at one point been at that ledge, and fallen off, and we still dwell on what might have been.  Even as we fall we still think of that other self, who at the last moment extended the wings of a different destiny and flew off to another life.  As we plunge into the river, we miss more than what we lost: we miss the potential of choice, and that spark of knowing that our destiny is not yet sealed.  And yet with each passing moment, noticed or unnoticed, we have closed another door, or opened one, or looked out the window instead, or stood there and watched the door walk off forever.  Perhaps we are not so afraid of whether we win or lose, but of the fact that if you win, you will not know what it’s like to lose, and so have you really won?  And if you lose, have you really lost?

You may look up, from underwater, at your winged self, but you will never know the kiss of the wind above those clouds, and your winged self will never know the embrace of the current beneath those waves.  In that sense we are alone.  And so we’re all carried along, by the river of dreams.

In the middle of the night.

One, Two

fly, bee
cat, see
man, say
sky, ray
sun, day

---

Boo Hoo

Ahh, saw her eye!
Aha, she saw you too?
Noo, bah
Why not?
Meh
You try and try
Who are you, man?
:hug: You, age ten
Ohh. Too bad for you.

And, in the end
We lie awake
And dream of making our escape

He kept on walking.  Each step hurt worse than the last, why was that?  Ah yes, one of his legs wasn’t working right.  He fought through the pain.  He had to keep going.  Forward, forward.  He slipped and crumpled to the floor.  He couldn’t get any purchase on the ground, it was so slippery.  He scrabbled around pathetically for a few moments.  He thought about maybe staying down, giving up.  But no, he was a fighter.  He was going to get out of this.

He got to his feet.  Well, most of them.  He winced and limped a few steps.  He couldn’t turn to the right, it hurt too much.  He angled himself to the left and took a step.  Why couldn’t he see where he was going?  It was hard to remember.  His antennae flexed in spasms, they curled up and straightened out compulsively.  He couldn’t smell anything but the overwhelming sickly sweetness.  It was the only smell he could remember.  It was the only smell he had ever smelled in his life.  That was a frightening thought.  Suddenly he was scared.  He furiously used his front legs to try to clean himself.  He had to get it off.  He had to get it off!  He was suffocating.  He gasped, and his thoughts blurred together.

* * *

He kept on flying.  He didn’t look behind him.  He didn’t waver; he was flying!  Fast and confident, his wings hummed strongly.  His black and yellow coat glimmered in the bright sun.  He was in a glimmering mood.  He was free.  He was never going back to her.  He flew faster and faster.  He was intoxicated with his own freedom.  He was enamored with the concept of belonging to no one, of having no one.  There was only him, and the wind.  There was only him.

He was more in the moment than he’d ever been.  He was exhilarated.  He soared faster and higher, his stinger vibrating, his eyes glistening.  He had been flying all his life, yet he felt like he had never flown before.  Here was something new.  He felt innocent, and light.  He rose higher and higher.  He became reckless.  He flew into an open window.  He fell.

* * *

He kept on crawling.  He was really getting sick of it.  He kept on looking at the sky, but he couldn’t go there.  It was forbidden.  It was home, and he was an exile.  What was his crime?  Did he deserve this?  He ached all over.  He was in a cage.  It was the worst kind of cage – a glass cage, with the world taunting him but just out of reach.  It wasn’t fair.  He was frustrated.  He became angry.  He became oddly happy.  He was filled with a fierce joy.  He spread his wings, buzzing loudly, and took off.

* * *

He kept on walking.  He angled himself to the left and took a step.  He couldn’t remember where he was going.  His wings hung limp and useless.  He couldn’t remember how to use them.  He sputtered and gasped and dragged himself another step.  He had to keep going.  In his delirious haze he clung to his movement.  His progress was the sole focus of his will.  Every step brought him closer to escape, closer to freedom, closer to something, anything.  He knew he was getting somewhere, he knew it and the idea sustained him.  It was oxygen to him.  He breathed it in with every painful step.  Forward, forward.  Leftward, leftward.  His mind stopped.  His thoughts flickered out.  The sickly sweet smell was gone.  He had no more regrets.  There was only him.  There was only this step, and the next step.  He walked slowly now, in smaller and smaller circles.  He was almost there.

When the truth is, I miss you
Yeah the truth is, that I miss you so
And I’m tired
I should not have let you go

So I crawl back into your open arms
Yes I crawl back into your open arms
And I crawl back into your open arms
Yes I crawl back into your open arms

Beginnings are funny – not as mundane as a typical middle but often not as poignant as an end.  Usually they seem to happen without any notice, mentioned only when one wants to complain about the sad decline from the good old days to the current crap.  But a beginning represents something significant: the will to create, the exertion of an effort, the quitting of some sort of same-old routine.  In that last sense beginnings are kinda like endings, I guess, but instead of nostalgia they have a sense of hope.  There is a certain enthusiasm and excitement at the beginning that you can’t get back once it fades – not necessarily because reality brings your dreams back to earth, but because the wonder of newness slowly fades into subtler appreciations, more nuanced but also more subdued.

Musicals start with an opening number, TV shows start with a teaser, Operas start with an overture.  And it is an overture, isn’t it?  Dictionary.com says an overture is “an opening or initiating move toward negotiations, a new relationship, an agreement, etc.; a formal or informal proposal or offer.”  I would argue that in many cases, beginnings are negotiations for that ever-closer guarded commodity of your time and attention.  Without an audience, the effort can’t even be judged as good or bad, it isn’t even noticed.

Beginnings are the first impressions, the orientations, the job interviews, the introductions, the handshakes.  And there’s a reason people judge so readily based on first impressions: because often they’re a good indicator of how the whole experience is going to unfold.  Despite this huge import, you also can’t forget the middle which comes right after – if you focus exclusively on an extravagant beginning, you end up with what seems like a lot of show but no substance.  As in all things, it’s a delicate balancing act.  And as in all delicate balancing acts, I tend to think that overthinking is one of the easiest mistakes to make.  And so we’re left with one of those modest beginnings, unassuming and unsuggesting, hinting at what could be lying in the future but leaving it mostly up to the imagination, conveying not just a proposal but sharing the pure wonder of newness without pretense.  After all,

It’s only the beginning
Only just the start