Fresh Starts

The pain and joy of beginnings and endings...

Hi Zan, Hi Pa

Volume #41

May 25th, 2025

On his Memorial Day, Zan and Pa would like to recognize the sacrifice of so many members of the American military, and the price their grieving families have paid. Without that sacrifice, we would be having very different kinds of conversations.

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HI, PA: Spring is in full swing here in northern Colorado, and by that I mean the trees are green, the temperatures are often in the 70s and 80s, and the Colorado State University seniors seem to be drinking champagne and taking graduation photos everywhere I look. Which has me thinking about endings, beginnings, and fresh starts…Can you think of any you’ve been through that were particularly significant?

HI, ZAN: What an interesting way to look at life—endings and beginnings. I can think of scores and scores of them across my own checkered history, but your question casts me back to a particular moment. I remember graduating from Brown, staying on an extra (miserable) year to earn a Master’s degree, working with kids the following summer, and then setting off with my friend Rick Starzak for a long-dreamed-of cross-country road trip. It was the end of my schooling and should have been the beginning of a career. But, even after all those years of ‘preparation,’ I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do, where, with whom, or how! Crazy.

Endings and beginnings almost always come in pairs, tied to each other. How do you look back on the end of your formal education?

ZAN: It’s interesting to look back on the end of my formal education because it was a more dramatic transition than I believed it to be at the time. When I graduated from high school I knew I wanted to take a gap year, but I assumed I’d go to college after that—I had no idea then, but I’d never actually make it back into the classroom. (At least I haven’t yet!) And I had no idea that would be the last phase of my life where I’d be free from the responsibilities of work and adulthood…if so I might have savored it more!

I remember graduating with a lot of youthful optimism, ambition, confusion, and deep sadness knowing my group of friends who I saw every single day might not be together in that way ever again. The future felt like a big question mark, and sometimes it weighed on me.

Most of the endings and fresh starts I can think of were confusing. Can you think of any ending in life in which you felt confident you knew what was coming next?

PA: Maybe my last day on a summer job my father got for me in 1971, working on the John Hancock Tower in Boston, a 60-story skyscraper, as it was being built. That day, I remember saying goodbye to the men I worked with, and remember that one of the other young summer guys had gotten us tickets to see Rod Stewart on Boston Common—it was the summer he put out Maggie May. I knew I was heading to freshman year at B.U. and would be living at home, so to some extent, at least, I had a sense of what would follow that ending, and that excellent concert. It felt something like the end of childhood and the beginning of the first stages of adulthood.

What was your happiest beginning?

ZAN: Well, for those of you who don’t know, last year I went through the most significant breakup of my life. Though the ending portion of that was (and continues to be) difficult in many ways, what surprised me the most was how happy the beginning was.

This major life event marked the beginning of me living alone for really the first time in my life (at age 27!), the beginning of a phase in which I’ve deepened my friendships and community ties like never before, the beginning of a tradition of daily solo dance parties when tidying up before bed, the beginning of the first time in my life I can remember when I could make myself my number-one priority…

Luckily, because I’ve been through so many bumpy life transitions already, this time around I knew more or less what to expect and felt prepared.

What are ways in which you prepare mentally for endings and beginnings? And what about those you can’t prepare for?

PA: You handled that difficult ending bravely and with dignity, as always.

What we’re talking about here, really, is change. And, for some reason, the phrase that comes into my mind while writing this is ‘light on your feet.’ I think there’s a way we have to be light on our feet in life in order to deal with the changes we will inevitably face. By that I don’t mean taking serious things too lightly, or not acknowledging how hard some parts of life can be.

I mean that we suffer less if we realize there are always going to be endings, some expected, some not. There is always going to be change, in ways small and large. On the small side, our favorite restaurant may close, we might catch Covid right before we’re planning to have a night out with friends, or our new boss might have different ideas about how to run the office.

On the big side, a serious illness, a marriage or long-term friendship breaking apart, a change in national government that makes us feel morally uncomfortable or physically endangered, loss of a job, loss of a spouse. Ultimately, the end of life.

We can’t prepare for everything, but we can try to live with an appreciation for the fact that nothing—nothing—is guaranteed. We can try to keep that impermanence in mind and stay light on our feet. Do you know what I mean?