The End of The Beginning

I ended yesterday’s thought with some Winston Churchill quotes and I wanted to begin today’s with another:

"Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

It’s said that Churchill delivered this quote as part of a 1942 speech after the U.K’s victory against Rommel’s Nazi’s in the African campaign. I doubt he knew they were at the half-way mark to the end of WW2 but it seems quite fitting for the message.

But this quote sprung up another by Mark Twain:

"The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”

It makes me think the journey to finding out why you were born brings one closer to the end of the beginning. From reading the writings of Carl Jung, he pointed out how many of his patients start thinking about looking within…introspecting…after their 50s (or 2/3 into most of their lives).

It seems that most (if not all) start their lives striving to fulfill a social desire. Whether it be called an extrinsic motivation or to merely fit into the social grouping of humanity, this general pursuit seems to become predominant as the mind is molded in youth.

I specifically speak to the period of the molding in youth because much of Freud’s work (and I think psychotherapy in general) put a greater depiction to what we felt/thought as children to explain our behaviour in adulthood. So the period of childhood had one’s mind unaffected by the social prerogative…until it finally got repressed in youth as one comes into greater contact with the outside world and becomes conscious of one’s place in society.

This seems like a long way of saying that we grow up to value the opinions of others more than that our ourselves and we reach a point where we’ve exhausted it to realize we’ve never had opinions of our own and that’s when we decide to plop down and think about the self we ignored for 20, 30, 40+ years.

Such realization might signal the end of the beginning.