Endings and Beginnings

By this age, I have been through a lot of endings and beginnings. High school, college, grad school, relationships, and places I've lived, to name a few. Sometimes it's just a mental thing. You feel like something has ended, and something else is beginning. Even if some things aren't entirely gone out of your life to constitute an ending, it might be the end of a phase and the start of a new one. I've been nostalgic lately, probably owing to watching This Is Us, the most nostalgic show ever known to man. The show is about a core family. A husband and wife whom we see grow old as they have 3 children, and then grandchildren. We see them and their children reminisce on their dating life before marriage, and their childhood respectively. It just makes me look back upon my life, childhood, grade school, high school, and college.

I think of all of the things I have been through, the experiences, the people I met that I shared memories with, who are now gone, not really in my life, or the people I am in contact with here and there. I think of the places I once roamed, how I felt in those moments, and how those places must be now that I'm not there. I think of all of the good times I had, that might have just slipped my mind, like the little laughs that once made my day. I realize I am nearing the end of grad school, which is probably another part of why I have been thinking back so much to all of the years past as this chapter comes to a close. I remind myself that we cannot look at the past as better that it was, while perhaps forgetting to favor the present for all that it is. The present is the culmination of everything we have learned and have been through. Who I am today is the truest version of me. My experiences today reflect more of me than it ever has, because I am a product of my entire life till now.

Endings and beginnings can be nostalgic and bittersweet, but the best feeling is when we learn to look back and appreciate the past without yearning for it. This is a new beginning, and the best is yet to come. 

-Cheryl Cherian

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