“What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.” –T. S. Eliot

I sometimes wonder if the reason I have for so long embraced the motto, you never fail until you quit is because I am so unskilled at endings. I feel like the tire that is stuck spinning in a muddy rut when it is time to move on. I have the will and the engine revving, but I can’t quite release the past. Something sticks in me or to me and flashes of memory, things that were said or left unsaid, flicker through my mind and I am sentimental about the smallest tokens.

Today was the last day for one of my close co-workers at Good Clean Love. In the close to eight years of growing the business I have had many people come and go, some staying for just a short time, others for long enough that their tenure marked the business in ways that changed me and what we were doing forever. Those are the people that have this long-term stickiness factor. I miss them and what they taught me and I miss how they enlivened the space for a long time. What I miss most is losing people who have helped me make things work. But I have been through this cycle enough times to know that the end is also a beginning. The end really is where we start over again.

Every transition, every letting go is where the next opening starts. There really isn’t a choice to make the end of things a new beginning. The alternative is getting stuck and closing down a little bit more at each ending. Even the sticky, messy business of letting go a little at a time is better than not doing it all.

Really the more days that go by in this ever changing life, the more I think that it is a constant starting over.