I often have reason to engage with ideas of endings and beginnings. In my teaching and consulting on leadership, there is a frequent requirement to address the challenges of organisational change and transformation. Understanding and implementing appropriate change management principles is crucial to success. These require a nuanced understanding of organisational dynamics and of human psychology. The very best approaches are highly alert to both dimensions, each dynamically informing the other.
Unsurprisingly, my work in leadership coaching immerses me in those same dynamics, though here the psychological dimensions are often more prominent, especially when the change is impactful personally for the leader – positive or negative.
The psychological response to change is helpfully viewed through the lens of the KR change curve. Its proponent, Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, was a psychiatrist who pioneered near-death studies. Working in the 1970s, she studied the grief response to loss and developed her 5-stages of dying/grief model. The five stages – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance – are present for everyone, though the intensity and time course can be immensely variable.
Noteworthy in the context to which I’m referring here is that subsequent studies revealed that the KR response applies to all situations of dramatic change, especially where such change might be apprehended as loss. Thus, in the workplace the aggregate response to significant organisational change is the superposition of multiple individual KR responses of varying intensities and time courses.
The change model developed by William Bridges is particularly cognisant of the psychological impact of the KR response. He helpfully identifies three stages of transition within the context of change:
- Ending (losing and letting go)
- The neutral zone
- New beginnings
Attending intentionally and carefully to each in turn can dramatically ease the acceptance of change at individual level and catalyse a creative embracing of new possibles.
The explicit juxtaposition of endings and beginnings is obvious but often overlooked. Acknowledging what is ending, and any associated sense of loss and letting go, is essential to a more wholehearted embrace of the possibilities of newness. The neutral zone provides that buffer during which the space to reprocess, readjust and reintegrate (i.e. navigate the ‘minimum’ of the KR curve) is gifted.
Endings and beginnings in the organisational setting are mostly addressed in mechanistic terms but Bridges encourages us to attend to a more personal dimension. In this regard, we can be encouraged and resourced by drawing upon some of the more insightful reflections in literature on endings and beginnings.
In the final movement of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, “Little Gidding” presents us with one of literature’s most profound meditations on the paradoxical relationship between endings and beginnings. The poem’s famous declaration that “In my end is my beginning” captures a fundamental truth about human experience: that conclusions and commencements are not opposing forces but intimately connected aspects of a single, continuous cycle of transformation.
Eliot’s exploration of this theme emerges from his visit to Little Gidding, a small religious community near Cambridge in the UK where Nicholas Ferrar established a religious retreat in the 17th century. The physical place becomes a metaphor for personal journeying, where the historical past and the eternal present converge. The chapel, visited by King Charles I during his darkest hour before execution, represents both an ending — the collapse of the old order — and a beginning — the possibility of spiritual renewal through contemplation and prayer.
The poem’s opening section establishes this temporal complexity immediately. “Midwinter spring is its own season,” Eliot writes, suggesting that even within the apparent death of winter lies the promise of renewal. This oxymoronic phrase captures the essential paradox of endings and beginnings: they exist simultaneously, each containing the seeds of the other. The “brief sun flames the ice” in a moment that is neither purely winter nor spring but something entirely new — a liminal space where transformation becomes possible.
This concept of the liminal, the threshold between states of being, runs throughout “Little Gidding” and reflects Eliot’s broader understanding of spiritual development. The poem suggests that we must fully inhabit our endings to discover our beginnings. The historical weight of Little Gidding — its associations with civil war, religious persecution, and royal defeat — does not diminish its psychological significance but rather deepens it. The place has absorbed centuries of human endings and yet continues to offer the possibility of new beginnings to each visitor who arrives with proper intention.
Eliot’s famous compound ghost sequence in the second section further develops this theme through an encounter with a figure who embodies both literary tradition and personal memory. This mysterious figure, combining elements of Dante, Yeats, and other poetic predecessors, represents the way that artistic endings become artistic beginnings. The conversation between the speaker and the ghost occurs in the liminal space of dawn after a World War II air raid — another moment poised between destruction and renewal, between the ending of night and the beginning of day.
The ghost’s message is particularly relevant to understanding endings and beginnings: “From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit / Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire / Which you must move through, or / Which will consume you.” This passage suggests that human development requires us to move through our endings rather than around them. The “refining fire” represents the transformative process by which what appears to be destruction becomes purification, by which apparent endings become the necessary preconditions for authentic beginnings.
This notion of necessary destruction echoes throughout the poem’s treatment of historical and personal memory. The Civil War battles that raged around Little Gidding, the dissolution of Ferrar’s community, the execution of Charles I — these historical endings are not presented as mere tragedies but as part of a larger pattern of death and renewal that characterises both individual development and collective human experience. The poem suggests that we honour the dead not by mourning their endings but by recognising how their conclusions enable our beginnings.
The fourth section’s brief lyric intensifies this meditation on transformation through its imagery of flame and rose. “The dove descending breaks the air / With flame of incandescent terror” presents eternal spirit not as gentle comfort but as a force of radical transformation. The flame that terrifies is the same flame that purifies; the ending of our old selves in this fire is simultaneously the beginning of our renewed spiritual existence. The “crowned knot of fire” that concludes this section suggests that love itself is this transformative flame — consuming what we were so that we might become what we are meant to be.
The poem’s final section brings these themes to their culmination in some of the most moving lines in modern poetry. “We shall not cease from exploration,” Eliot writes, “And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” This paradox captures the essential nature of human development: that genuine progress involves a return to origins with deepened understanding. Our endings bring us back to our beginnings but transformed by the journey.
The circular nature of this psychological geography reflects Eliot’s understanding that time itself is not linear but cyclical, or perhaps spiral — we revisit the same places, the same questions, the same spiritual challenges, but at different levels of understanding. Each ending prepares us for a beginning that will inevitably lead to its own ending, which will prepare us for another beginning. This is not futile repetition but progressive deepening, like the movement of the seasons or the turning of a prayer wheel.
“Little Gidding” ultimately suggests that the fear of endings that haunts human consciousness is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of existence. When we recognise that “In my end is my beginning,” we can approach our conclusions — whether they be the end of relationships, careers, life phases, or life itself — not with terror but with anticipation. Each ending contains within it the promise of renewal, transformation, and deeper understanding.
This unity of ending and beginning represents the deepest wisdom that “Little Gidding” offers: i.e. that the fulfilled life consists not in avoiding endings but in learning to recognise them as the very substance of our beginnings, the raw material from which renewal is always possible.
