Starting a New Ending

“Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.”

Maria Robinson

It’s true, we can’t unwrite the past, but we can do our best to change how the story ends. Sometimes we forget that even if something has started in a less than optimum way, we still have a shot at changing the course of the journey. That is not to say that this is a simple task – because it’s not. The energy with which something starts does tend to have a strong effect on how it proceeds – but we do not have to passively accept this. With focus and intent, we can change the energy and, in doing so, change the outcome. I once read a study about hospitalizations that had resulted in an unexpected bad outcome for the patient due to a series of errors.

An example of the types of cases the study looked at would be someone going in for simple arthroscopic knee surgery and ended up in the ICU on life support. What the study found was that the ‘negative’ experience for many of these patients started long before the ending ‘bad’ event. They found that upon admission, simple clerical mistakes were made and not corrected. They found that pre-op test reports that should have been waiting in the patient’s chart upon check-in had been misfiled. They found small but consecutive errors that occurred in many different aspects of the hospitalization. On the whole, what they learned was that it was often several small insignificant mistakes that happened in sequence that culminated into one grand catastrophic event. It seemed that when a band of ‘small negatives’ were allowed to stick together without interruption, that an opportunity for disaster was somehow created.

This study should not cause fear; instead, it should cause each of us to be better observers of the small moments in our lives…. because those small moments create the big moments in the end. Always remember that we are co-creators to our own story. If we do not like how a chapter has begun, it's up to us to create a different ending. We usually cannot do it in one fell swoop. Instead, we have to watch the small moments, and when we catch one that has gone awry, we must find a way to right it so that it does not have a chance to ‘band together’ with any others.

Can you think of a time in your life where the opening moments of an experience correctly predicted the ending to that experience?

Did you actively work to change the small moments that followed the bad beginning and, therefore, change how the story ends?

Or did you just move forward passively?