Every New Beginning Comes From an Ending: Learning to Grow Through Change

My dearest incurable humanist,

Tomorrow I’m starting a new stage in my life! Beginning something I’ve worked towards for years. I am so excited about this new stepping stone in my career. I can’t share what it is with you yet, but tomorrow is my ‘first day’. Or well, actually today, since you’re reading this when it’s already Tuesday.

This has all got me thinking about new beginnings. As Semisonic sings in their 1998 one-hit wonder, “Closing time, every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” And how true is that, isn’t it? We resist change so many times, or at least I know I do. But that familiar thing we’re leaving behind for the ‘unknown’, once was the ‘unknown’ too. Change comes in many forms: moving, letting go of someone, grieving, quitting a job. These things are scary, but thinking of it that way, I guess it’s a bit less scary?

When I was growing up, I always got the ‘Sunday scaries’ before the first day of school every year, fearing if I’d be in the same class as my friends, or if this school year would be ‘harder’ as older kids tend to warn you about. When I was in second grade I switched to a new school, and I still remember vividly the night before, twisting and turning in my bed with a knot in my stomach.

We often think of new beginnings as interruptions, when they’re actually part of how we grow. We talk about adapting to change as if it’s a skill we can eventually perfect, but it’s a muscle that keeps reforming every time life throws something new at us. Psychologists Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey explain this through their “Immunity to Change” model, stating we resist not just because of fear, but because hidden assumptions and competing commitments protect our current sense of self, even when we want to evolve. And maybe that’s why beginnings matter so much; they ask us to recognize that staying the same was never really the goal. Yet even knowing that, the night before always brings back that knot in my stomach, with equal parts excitement, anxiety and over-thinking. It’s the same knot I felt as a child, and one my dad knew just how to untie.

On my first day of school ever, my dad took me, and since I was now “a big girl” attending school (mind you, I was two and a half - LOL); he played rock classics like Stairway to Heaven and Hotel California and told me I should always remember this day. So since then, every time I have a ‘first day’, I always play “Stairway to Heaven” on my way to whatever I’m going to for the first time.

If you’re also starting something new or afraid to do so, play your favorite song and remember “every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”

Until next week.