Starting Over

“Maybe we reached the mountain peak,

And there’s no more left to climb.

And maybe we lost the magic piece,

And we’re both too blind to find.

Let’s start over, let’s give love their wings,

Let’s start over, Stop fighting ’bout the same old thing,

 Let’s start over; we can’t let our good love die,

 Maybe we can start all over, Give love another life.”

Beyonce – Start Over

Third blog in and I’m sure you’re thinking this should have been my first post. However, I think it has followed a logical order and I’ll explain how. The first post “I just don’t know” reveals we’ve come to a dead end. (Not a crossroad as that implies we have options.) A complete halt. Even if we charged through the brick walls, we’d still find ourselves in a black abyss. Like a path that stops at the edge of a cliff, we have come to the end of the road. Therefore step one would involve admitting ‘this is it’. No longer can we keep going in this direction.

The next post was “Background to my Background.” I’m trying to be clever here so stay with me for a minute. Let’s just focus on the word ‘Background’. In some context background refers to a person’s social heritage or what they did in the past. We all know the famous sayings ‘In order to go forward, we must first go back’ and ‘you can’t know where you are going until you know where you’ve been.’ So in order to move forward, occasionally you have to be willing to look back on the past and reflect on what didn’t work and how you can do things differently. You have to back to when you reached that crossroad; go back to rediscover your values, your passions and yourself you lost along the way.

That brings us to  “Starting Over”. I’m sure we all know what it means to start over. Even if we can’t define it with clarity and perspective, our experiences and the situations we’ve found ourselves in illustrate our understanding of the phrase ‘starting over’.

To use an analogy; let’s think of the buttons on a DVD player (I was about to write video player, then I realised I need to keep up with the times. You know how technology is forever upgrading) so think of the buttons on a BLU RAY Player (2013, baby). Life goes on at Play. If you’re living in the fast lane, and your life metaphor is that life is a race, you’re probably on the Fast Forward button. For moments of reflection you have the Pause and for periods of retrospect and regression, there’s the Rewind; maybe you missed something important and need to go back a few steps. Now the Skip Forward/Back button is more exact. For those people that spend a lot of time on Pause, they are able to Skip to specific moments; they know precisely how far back they need to go, or what the next step is. Skip Forward is what I like to call the Move On button. It works particularly well in relationships where it’s not a matter of going back a few steps but completely moving on to the next chapter.

Now in light of all this starting over would be the remaining two buttons; Stop and Eject. It’s time to take out American Beauty because you’ve seen the film a million times and no matter how many times you rewind, forward or pause, it still ends the same way. So why don’t you put in something more humorous or action-packed? Maybe it’s time for a movie with a happy ending!

Starting over is about doing something NEW! In order to differentiate it from moving on or taking a break, it has to be fresh and most times disconnected from what it once was.  It has to be on a new set of terms, with a new set of ideas; detached from previous emotions and hurts yet in light of past failures. Obviously it’s not always easy especially with people reminding you of the way you used to do things and how you used to be, but it’s greatly possible because you can always restart; changing the movie as many times until you find the one you truly love. It’s not about erasing out the part of the picture you don’t like but completely ripping out the page and starting on a blank sheet.

Starting Over is coming to an end and going from a new beginning. So exactly how does one Start Over you ask? Only when you believe you have truly reached THE END, will you be able to Start Over!