The End and the Beginning: It Has Always Been With Us
Marian de Silva
As I was looking for inspiration to write an article, I scrolled endlessly through quotes, essays, and fragments of other people’s thoughts on Instagram and Pinterest. Somewhere between the noise of reels, opinions, and politics, I stumbled upon a line that read, “The world has ended for me many times and still began again in the morning.” Well… It felt very personal.
Perhaps because every one of us has felt something similar at least once, if not, many times, in life. We have all tripped, fallen, and believed that the ground beneath us had collapsed and the sky full of stars had gone pitch dark. Yet, here we are, standing again and resuming our lives. When we pause long enough to look back, we realise that we have survived circumstances, experiences, heartbreaks, and obstacles that once seemed too overwhelming to endure. Life, it seems, has a peculiar habit of ending and beginning again. Some people would say their world ended the day they lost someone they loved. There are moments in life when grief arrives without warning and settles heavily in the heart. The house that once echoed with laughter suddenly feels quiet. A chair at the dining table remains empty. The touch of the hand that held yours and the familiar voice that once called out your name, sang songs becomes only a memory. In those moments, time seems to pause, as if the world itself has lost its rhythm.
Then there are endings that come through relationships. Friendships that slowly fade into polite distance. Love that once felt permanent but gradually dissolves into unfamiliar and painful silence. Especially when someone loved another person deeply, only to realise that the relationship had been nothing more than a passing moment for the other. Promises once spoken with conviction are later forgotten with convenient silence. When bonds break, people often describe the feeling as though something inside them has shattered beyond repair. For others, the end comes through failure. The student who worked tirelessly for years, only to see their exam results fall short of expectations. The graduate who sends dozens of job applications and receives nothing but silence in return. The employee who wakes up one morning to learn that the job their whole family depended on has disappeared overnight. Dreams collapse quietly in such moments. The horror you feel is unimaginable.
And in those moments, it truly feels like the end of the world.
But strangely, the sun still rises the next morning. The same streets remain crowded with people rushing to work. The same buses arrive at the same stops. Vendors open their shops, children walk to school, and tea is brewed in countless kitchens across the country. The world continues its routine with a calm indifference to our private disasters. At first, this continuation feels almost cruel. How can life move forward when our own world feels as if it has stopped? Yet within that quiet continuation lies one of life’s most powerful lessons: endings rarely remain endings forever. Human beings possess an extraordinary ability to adapt, even when they believe they cannot. The mind slowly begins to rearrange itself around loss. What once felt unbearable gradually becomes something we learn to carry. The heaviness does not disappear entirely, but we grow stronger and stronger. Consider the number of people who once believed their life was over after a single failure. History, and even our own personal circles, are full of individuals who were rejected, overlooked, or underestimated before eventually finding their place in the world. Sometimes an exam failure redirects someone toward a path they had never considered. Sometimes the loss of a job becomes the push that leads a person to discover new skills, new ambitions, or new courage. Sometimes a broken relationship teaches lessons about self-respect, boundaries, and understanding that would have otherwise taken years to learn.
If you are going through a struggle that has consumed your energy, effort, and time, perhaps it is a sign to step outside that bubble and allow yourself to breathe again. If you meet people who diminish or manipulate your values, ethics, and beliefs for their own benefit, take it as a sign to walk away. It will not be the end of your world if you leave someone who does not deserve you. In many cases, it may very well be the beginning.
In hindsight, what once felt like destruction often becomes transformation.
This is not to romanticise pain. Loss is painful. Disappointment is real. Heartbreaks leave scars that do not heals easily. It would be dishonest to pretend that every ending carries an immediate hidden blessing. But life rarely unfolds in straight lines. Instead, it moves in unpredictable circles where endings and beginnings quietly overlap. A seed must disappear beneath the soil before it grows into a tree. Night must fall before morning returns. Even the changing seasons remind us that decline, and renewal are not opposites, but partners in the same endless cycle. Perhaps this is why human beings continue to endure even when circumstances appear unbearable. Somewhere deep within us exists a stubborn instinct to try again. We wake up the next morning. We drink our tea. We step outside once more. Even when we feel fragile, even when the future seems uncertain, something within us whispers that there may still be another chapter waiting to unfold. Sometimes the beginning is dramatic. It might take some time, maybe even a few months, before we feel fresh and healed again. A new job opportunity arrives unexpectedly. A chance encounter introduces a friendship that reshapes our lives. A long-delayed dream finally begins to take form.
But often, the beginning is far more subtle.
It appears in small acts of courage. The first time someone laughs again after a long period of grief. The moment a discouraged student decides to study once more. The quiet decision to forgive someone, or perhaps to forgive oneself. Beginnings do not always arrive with celebration. More often, they arrive quietly, disguised as ordinary days. There is something extraordinarily comforting about this pattern of endings and beginnings. It reminds us that no moment in life is entirely permanent, not the joy and not the sorrow. The highs will pass, but so will the lows. Ancient philosophers often spoke about the impermanence of life. At first glance, impermanence sounds unsettling. Yet it is precisely this impermanence that allows renewal to exist.
If nothing ever ended, nothing new could ever begin.
A person who once felt defeated may later discover resilience. Someone who once doubted their own strength may eventually realise how much they have grown simply by surviving difficult times. Perhaps that is why people often say that the most meaningful chapters of life begin after moments that once felt like the end. When we look back at our past, many of us can identify several such moments. The day we thought everything had fallen apart. The night we believed we had no clear path forward. The moment we wondered how we would ever recover.
Yet time moved forward. And so should we.
Life rarely asks whether we are ready for a new beginning. It simply places another morning before us and waits to see what we will do with it. Some mornings feel hopeful, while others feel uncertain. But each carries the quiet possibility of renewal. Perhaps that is the strange beauty of being human. We are fragile enough to feel deeply and strong enough to begin again. The world may end for us many times through loss, failure, disappointment, or heartbreak. But morning always returns. And with it comes another opportunity to rebuild, rethink, and rediscover the strength we never realised we possessed. The cycle of endings and beginnings has always been with us. And perhaps, in ways we do not always notice, it always will be.
