Standing at the Start of Something

My youngest had her last day of daycare this week. There was no ceremony, just a quiet goodbye that afternoon, a rotation to the next room, the kind of small ending that slips right past you if you aren’t watching. But I was watching her. And she was not sad. Why would she be. To her this was not an ending at all… it was the first morning of the enormous thing called school, a threshold she was walking toward with her whole body. I was standing in that same little room mourning a chapter closing. She was standing at the front of one opening. Same doorway. Two completely different views.

And what struck me is how fascinating it is that two people can sit inside the exact same moment and experience it in such vastly, profoundly different ways. I was feeling an ending. She was feeling only a beginning. The same small goodbye, the same doorway, and somehow two entirely different afternoons. I found that less sad than genuinely astonishing.

And I don’t think it was really about daycare. It was about which way you stand in a doorway. A threshold has two faces. From one side it is the end of something you’re leaving: the small room, the low sinks, the version of your life that fit inside that chapter. From the other side it is the beginning of something you haven’t entered yet. It is the exact same doorway. The only thing that changes is where you’re standing and which direction you’ve decided to look.

Here is what I’ve noticed about getting older, and I’ll say it plainly because I think it’s true for more of us than will admit it. Somewhere along the way we drift to the back of every doorway. We get good at noticing what’s ending. A child starts school and we feel the years we won’t get back instead of the years about to begin. A birthday with a zero in it lands as subtraction. We become fluent in the grammar of endings, and we start reading every threshold in that language by default, as a thing closing behind us rather than a thing opening ahead.

My daughter has not learned that language yet. To her a threshold is only ever a beginning. That is not naïveté. That is a way of seeing, and it is the one I keep trying to get back to. There’s a phrase for it in the tradition I’ve spent a good part of my life reading about: beginner’s mind, the discipline of standing in front of the room you haven’t entered yet and meeting it as genuinely new. The remarkable thing about beginner’s mind is that it is available to a fifty-year-old exactly as much as it is to a five-year-old. It is not a stage of life you age out of. It is a place to stand. It is a choice about which way to face.

And this, finally, is what I think a real journey is for.

Not scenery. Not a break from the year. A real journey is a deliberate first morning: a threshold you choose to walk to the front of, on purpose, and cross with your whole attention. You step into something you were a genuine beginner at the day before: a place, a history, an argument two and a half thousand years old. And you come out the far side seeing the whole downstream world differently. Not because the world changed while you were gone. Because you did. That knowledge doesn’t reverse. Once you’ve stood where a thing actually began, every later version of it reads as a clue pointing back to the source: every translation, every echo, every temple or museum room you walk into for the rest of your life. You didn’t just visit a place. You upgraded the frame through which you’ll see everything after it.

We’re building a journey right now that is almost embarrassingly literal about this. This coming January, Dr. Malcolm David Eckel, Professor Emeritus of Religion at Boston University, is leading a small group of us through Eastern India, from Bodh Gaya to Nalanda to Kolkata and down the Odisha coast. It is fifteen days in the physical record of one of the most consequential arguments human beings have ever had: about suffering, meaning, and what a life is for. It is the place the whole tradition began, before it traveled out across a continent and became the hundred beautiful things it became everywhere else. You can visit those downstream versions in Japan, in Sri Lanka, in a quiet room in your own city. They are extraordinary. But they are the translation. This is the origin.

I could tell you that as a reason to book a trip. I’d rather tell you the truer thing underneath it.

Some things feel like they’re ending. The flip side is always a beginning. Travel is one of the ways we get to create new beginnings on purpose: new mornings, new perspectives, new lines drawn deliberately instead of ones we only notice in the rear-view. You do not have to wait for life to hand you a threshold and then grieve it from the back of the room. You can be the one who decides where the milestone goes. You can choose the shift. It is genuinely in your hands.

So here is the thing I keep wanting to say to the version of me standing in that little daycare room, and maybe to you too. Eastern India is not the end of a story. It is the beginning of one that runs across a continent and 2,500 years, and you can follow it. You are allowed, in the full middle of a full life, to stand at the front of a doorway. To choose the frame. To begin something.

Same doorway. The view is yours to choose.

— Mary

P.S. If you’d like to know more about the January journey through Eastern India with Dr. Eckel, write to me at mary@farhorizons.com. I answer these myself.