There Are No Beginnings in the Story of Life

There Are No Beginnings in the Story of Life

A movie knows when to start. The lights go down. The music comes up. Someone walks into the frame, and we understand: This is where the story begins.

Life has never been so considerate.

You come back to a project you set aside a year ago. It feels familiar until you notice how much has changed. The people you knew have taken on new responsibilities. Someone has moved away. Someone you barely knew is now doing the work that holds everything together. You have changed, too.

The story faded into the background while you attended to another one. It kept moving without you. Now it is in the foreground again, and you have to meet the characters where they are today.

I think about this in politics. A campaign kickoff is a useful date for the invitations and the photographs. But if it is the beginning of your relationship with the community, you started too late.

You should already know local leaders. You should know what they have been trying to accomplish, including the work that never made the news. You should have a plan for meeting more people with the help of relationships you have already built. And you should be ready to hear that your plan needs work.

Those relationships have stories of their own. There is the community leader you have known for years, whose priorities may have changed since you last sat down together. There is the neighbor you met only recently, though after enough meetings, calls, and shared work, it is hard to remember the block without them in it. While your campaign occupies the front of your mind, each of them is living a life in which your campaign is only one part.

This is part of why I built Activate (www.letsactivate.us). Campaign work should carry forward what people learn at the doors, on the phones, and from the volunteers doing the listening. A conversation today may tell you whom to call tomorrow. A neighbor who says “not yet” may have something important to tell you months later. The relationships belong to the people building them; the work continues after the kickoff photograph is taken.

Psychologists do find that beginnings matter to us. In experiments, Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman, and Jason Riis found that when a date felt like the start of a new period, people were more inclined to take steps toward a goal. A birthday or the first day of spring can give us a welcome reason to begin again. (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

We also make sense of our lives by telling stories about them. In a longitudinal study, Dan McAdams and colleagues found both continuity and change in the meaningful scenes people chose for their life stories. We carry parts of the old account forward, even as we come to understand them differently. (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

So I understand why we look for a first page and a final scene. Research on psychological closure suggests that how we remember and retell an experience can affect whether it feels settled. That feeling is real. It does not require every person, relationship, or piece of work to reach a neat ending. (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

In entertainment, an ending tells us when to leave our seats. In life, one soundtrack fades while another grows louder. A friend returns after several stories away, carrying news you could not have written for them. An old effort becomes urgent again. Some people will not return. Sometimes the last conversation was the last conversation, and you did not know it while you were having it.

We cannot always finish all our lines with one another. We can try to say the generous thing while there is time. We can thank people for what they taught us. We can pick up the work they cared about and bring something of them into the next part of the story.

And when a story comes back around, we can listen before deciding we know how it goes.

If you are preparing to run for office, start showing up now. If you have stepped away from work that mattered, you may find a way back into it. If you have lost your place, look around. There are people here, and there is still something you can do with them.

The scene you are in matters. So do the ones happening just beyond your view. Take the best wishes you have been given, offer yours freely, and keep going.

Your story is still being written.