Forget for now the new beginning. Focus instead on what awaits its end. Endings are essential. High-quality endings are gem-like in their simplicity and clarity. Until something old dies, nothing new is born. “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless the grain of wheat, having fallen to the ground, should die, it abides alone; but if it should die, it bears much fruit.”
Death is not the opposite of life. It’s the opposite of birth. We’re born astride the grave, as that hard-nosed existentialist Samuel Beckett put it. Anyway, life is non-dual. It has no opposite.
The hallmark of the human is his desire for continuousness. And his performative grief when that balloon pops.
As every resurrection requires a corpse, the birth of a new man requires the death of an old one. Who is the new man? He has no fear. Not even a shred remains.
The real calamity is not that we die but that we are born. There is no school of truth. We are fated to find out the hard way that life has no opposite.
Men's Work 