Today I picked up Jojo Moyes’ latest novel Between the End and the Beginning.
And as it often is with books – sometimes you don’t need to read a hundred pages to feel that one sentence has already done all the work inside you. In my case, one was enough:
“It’s high time to turn the apparent end of the world into the beginning of a new life.”
Simple, right? And yet it sounds like a declaration, like an invitation. Because how many of us still walk around with the thought that an “end” is final? That if something has closed, all that remains is mourning and recalling what once was? Meanwhile, Moyes throws us a provocation: maybe it’s not about loss at all, but about transition?
Endings take different forms – sometimes they are subtle, like a message that will never get a reply, or a meeting that turns out to be the last, though no one sensed it at the time. Sometimes they are abrupt, like an argument after which there is no way back to closeness, or a sudden closing of doors that once seemed always open. But always – and here it’s hard not to agree with the author – they carry within them the potential of a beginning. Only we, with a stubbornness worthy of a better cause, prefer to look back.
Maybe because it’s easier to cling to familiar pain than to step into the unknown?
Easier to say “this is the end” than to have the courage to add: “and now I begin again.”
Because a new beginning requires risk, movement, decision – while an ending? An ending can be put back on the shelf like an old book.
Moyes reminds us that the “end of the world” is often only an apparent end.
The world doesn’t collapse – it only changes the layout of the walls, shifts the doors, and makes us walk down another corridor. And we, though at first we rebel, stomping our feet, soon discover that behind that new entrance lies a space we had no idea existed.
And maybe this is precisely the power of literature: to stop us at such a sentence and force us to ask – what in my life have I taken for an ending, and what could in fact be a beginning?
Maybe it’s time to close the chapter written by others’ expectations and open the one whose authorship belongs only to me. Maybe it’s the moment to reshape the words “nothing will come of this” into: “something entirely new will come of this.”
Because endings are inevitable. But beginnings – that’s our decision.