The End Before the Beginning

"All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another." - Anatole France 


No wonder I am so tired!!


This quote comes to me from a colleague and struck me directly.  With all that I have done in my life, the places I have traveled, the things I have seen and experienced, the people I have met, I have always felt profoundly sad, depressed even, at the end of each "thing" that has happened in my life, eventually followed by the excitement of the next.  I always thought this was because I am so goal oriented that this was simply the vacuous feeling once the goal was achieved and the days and months spent attaining that goal were over, I had never thought of this as grief over what was being left behind, what was ending, at least not until now.


Where does the phrase "to die a thousand deaths" come from??  Wherever, and whomever, it now seems vastly appropriate.  Just the eight years with "the firm," I was constantly reaching the end and forging a new beginning, essentially every few months.  We did this with such regularity and absolute abandon that I was on a golf course in Chicago on a Thursday afternoon, packed and on a plane for London on Sunday, back in Chicago on Friday to put everything I owned in storage and back in London the following Monday for a year of working in Europe.


For my year in Europe there were three hellos and three goodbyes.  Wow.  Just never really thought of it this way.  Another thought that came across my desk today had to do with the true cost of something rather than simply the dollar cost.  The vacation home may cost three hundred grand, but what about the five years of working nights and weekends it took to get it.  What was the true cost of the way I have loved my life, and the experiences I have had?


Single, alone, tired, old, fat, bald, glasses, no kids, hmmmm, what cost indeed.


Thank you again for getting this far with me.