Recently I was cleaning out my room and discovered my high school backpack, still full of papers from senior year. As I sorted through the hundreds of old papers, I stumbled across some thoughts I had jotted down in those last few weeks.

Endings are more predictable than beginnings. When something begins, there's ambiguity, but when it ends, you know what will be gone. An ending means a new time of unpredictability is around the corner. The process of ending is a process of finding freedom from the past, whether the past was good or bad.

When something ends, we begin to view it in the past tense, which changes our perception of how events happened or how they made us feel. In memory, the extremes are brought out, the highs become happier and the lows are either amplified or dulled by the power of the more joyful remembrances. Endings give us the freedom to leave behind the bad and pursue a new better reality, or they allow us to build on past successes to forge a new future. Life builds on previously laid stones; occasionally we have to stop building on one section in order to begin other parts of the whole structure. The architecture of our lives is less like a tower of ABC blocks, and more like a Frank Lloyd Wright house, full of funny spirals and multi-levels.

Each time we step from one period of time to another, we shape who we are and who we will become. At the ending, we take certain changes along with us and leave others behind. In some regard we're locked into each of those past moments, who we were at that point in time will always feel and act that way. Endings give us the choice of what we want to carry over to the next stage. We become who we decide to be. If our choices today reflect our dreams for the future, we enable those dreams to become a reality.

One of my mentors told me that what makes you who you are isn’t the way you dress or the activities you’re involved in, but the things that make you angry, the things that make you cry, the things that break your heart, the things that melt your heart and the things that make you happy. Over the years, the outward manifestations of identity change a bit, but the core of who you are remains the same. Just because an ending has arrived, it doesn't mean that you can't take the person you were in that time with you.