TOW: Transitions

I heard an interesting quote a while ago, while discussing the face of change, and it goes like this: "It's not the end, it's just a new beginning." So, it's not the last piece of pie you just ate, it's the beginning of a new source of bulge around your hips. While this is poignant, I also feel that there is something else to transitions in our lives. Transitions are periods where we feel a strange combination of bored and resentful to our current circumstances.

Take my life, for example. I've been a working man for, I would say, a total of a year now. I've changed jobs 5 times, moved 3 times (moving on to the 4th very soon!) and skimmed the poverty line twice. But now I'm going back to school for a professional program, and planning to stream-line myself back into the real world. You know, that place...that place...I don't go to on a regular basis. Eh heh. Sigh.

But this time I see being a student much, much differently. Yes, I'm going to have a good time. Yes, I plan to slack off whenever possible and stay up late and eat candy and make plenty of friends. But more importantly, I'm going to put a stamp on everything that I do that says, "BRENNAN DID THIS AND IT'S AMAZING." Because I can see that previously, in my student career, sometimes I took it a little too easy...and I didn't try as hard as I coulda-shoulda-woulda. Because, like we all do, sometimes we hold back so that in case we fail, it won't hurt as much.

Having lived on the brink of life-failure for the last year or so, I have come to realize that life is not about succeeding the normal sense of the word (although it is a pleasant feeling) it's about what you do after you succeed. Some people are haunted by their past successes, and the feeling that haunts them is the very feeling that prevents them from transitioning...from making the leap into the you and me we were meant to be. If we don't make that leap, we end up in a limbo...in a place where we can't manage who we are because we've stop learning, stopped caring, and stopped being ourselves. And transitions were meant to be times of success, not times of failure.

Real success, as far as I can tell, isn't about the successes we have, but how we manage to transition after our fleeting spotlight moment has passed. Moving from success to success is the only way to live a life worth living. And we all deserve to move from failure into success.

Because it's never the end; it's just a new beginning.