Life – what more can I say that hasn’t already been said. It starts. It ends. It can do so hundreds of times a day for a single person, or only once – as it is realized before one dies.
It begins with a new breath, a new smile, a new love. It can end with a tear, a passing, a sadness – a separation. In all cases, it is a continuous thread of beginnings and ends. It is the realization of a new perspective, one that can re-invigorate us to feel in ways we didn’t think possible. Life can rush through our lungs with a skip of the heart.
Life is so intricately deep and sometimes so shockingly simple; always beautiful. A lesson learned can open up new doorways – or – it can tie off fears we’ve been holding on to our entire lives for safety. For comfort.
It can be a prison. One we create around ourselves and find convenience in naming it a fortress, an attitude, a conviction. And to be free, or taste freedom, or free oneself. I am free – for now. I see a world I didn’t see before but know it has always been there. Untouched, for better and worst.
I have yet another new life, but far from the last life to be lived. True – it is nothing more than a new story to describe my already present surroundings; it changes nothing, but changes everything so absolutely. No one and no thing has changed but me. My mind. My eyes. But I am still myself – that I am sure of.
Growth is the escape, the new beginning. Not to destroy the singular life that came before it but to continue the thread of lives born within it.
So what has changed? The prison in which I kept myself? Or more importantly what starts a change, a new beginning, a new life? The catalyst lies in the recognition that prisons do not need to be powerful, ugly, large or made of steel, but they can be gentle, subtle, comforting and safe. They can coddle us in answers to questions we’re searching for but may have never needed to. Those prisons are the hardest to escape.
To escape yourself and what makes you comfortable without losing “yourself” in the process, that is the question. Can you allow a life to end so that a new one can begin without a fear of the end or anxiousness for the beginning? That is the moat and bars that prevent escape.
But it is possible. It is progress. It is life, and life is a plurality.
Sean Shadmand 