Start at the Very Beginning

I had story time with a friend a few days ago which is our way to catch each other up on our lives. We haven't known each other for very long, so there are a lot of gaps between what we think we should know about each other and what we actually do. The problem with having story time is having to start at the beginning of stories. For me, that is absolutely brutal. I'm too aware that so many things influence each other and that so many parts of my life are really tied together. I began to tell her about a friend who I have become very attached to over the past year since I met him. She didn't know anything about him, so I had to go all the way back to the point we met.

When you tell a story, how far are you supposed to go back to create a prologue? And what exactly does start at the beginning mean? When we begin to tell a story, there are always threads that we choose to follow and ones that we choose to let fall. Occassionally we try and trace a thread back to the very beginning. The only problem then lies in determining where the beginning really comes. Does it come at the point where two lives first cross or where a life begins? When we are told to start at the very beginning, what definition is it that we choose?

There is the beginning of time, the beginning of history, the beginning of civilizations. We have our own beginnings that are unique from everyone else. The interesting thing to look at is the fact that every beginning is a part of an ending. Without an ending of some kind, nothing new can begin. It may be the end of a university career that leads to the beginning of a life in the real world. The end of a relationship leads to the possibility of something new. I suppose when we start at the beginning, we are really starting at an end and at a beginning. All of our lives blend into a combination of beginnings and endings. To go back the beginning goes through a number of endings and different possibilities we may have originally ignored. We trace the threads back through our lives to the beginning and find that there are beginnings of beginnings. There are always more things to consider and more things involved than we thought there were. It's only when we try to start at the beginning that we see how far we really have to go to get there. And in seeing how far we have to go to get there, we see how far we have come.