On Beginning From the end

I was considering for a while where to begin before writing my first piece here.
Do I simply enter mid-stream, as if this were chapter ten of a book?
Or do I start with a proper introduction of myself, the things I care about, and what I will be writing about?

More questions than answers.

So I decided to do what so often helps me: place a thought in my head and let it sit there for a while. Sometimes it takes days, sometimes weeks, hours, or even years.
Once a quiet query appears, my whole system begins to search for things, people, and ideas that resonate with it — or contradict it just enough to move me toward the answer I need.

I can support the process with a walk, or by shopping at the market, or going to the sauna, or cleaning — especially cupboards (a very powerful method when the answer I need involves structure).
Or I can cook something slow and inspiration-consuming.
Or open my box of colour pencils and let myself sink into them.
Colour pencils have always felt like a small feast you can have at any moment — you look at all those shades and think: anything is possible.

It was a winter Sunday afternoon, the light already thinning, when I felt that a burst of colour from my pencils might be exactly what I needed.
I chose yellow–orange–red–brown tones to colour a mandala in the book I received from my secret Santa, and I began to fill the shapes.

Ah yes, yellow. My absolute favourite colour to work with.
I sometimes feel all the other colours exist only to let yellow shine more brightly.
For me, yellow is the stand-in for the Sun in real life.

Thirty minutes of colouring — and suddenly I understood:
I want to start from the end.
I want to write about death.

Years ago I heard a phrase from an older man:
“The way you die is the result of how you have lived.”
At the time, I found the idea almost ridiculous.
How can one moment — and not even a triumphant one — be the result of an entire life?

I stored the phrase away, but it resurfaced now and then.
It quietly linked “death” and “how we live” in my mind.
Maybe that was my first step toward thinking about death as something real — simply real — not dramatic, not sad, not heavy.
Just a fact: life ends.

As a child, I read many fairy tales. The ones where kings searched for eternal life never resonated with me.
What is the point of living forever if everyone dear to you is gone?
With whom do you share anything?

Another question, quietly stored.

Every time I lost a family member or a friend — especially a young one — I received another reminder that life has an end.
For some it comes earlier, for others later, but it always comes.
It is unbearably unfair in the moment, but it is a rule we cannot change.

There is a phrase I once heard:
“When you are angry at someone, imagine that they might no longer be here.
Yes, the anger would disappear — but so would the person.
Then ask yourself: is that really what you want?”

I lived with that for a long time.
We do get angry with our parents — for too much guidance, too much interference, too much of many things — but that is the irritation of today, not the truth of a lifetime.
And life, as we know, is finite.

It takes courage, or time, or something different for each of us, to accept that death is part of life, just as birth is.
Neither good nor bad — simply a fact.
We accept the fact and continue living.

And here I understood why those colours led me to this topic.
Yellow is always yellow, but it looks infinitely brighter beside black.
We notice it more; we appreciate its warmth more.

When we know the black edge exists — but it is not here yet — we can enjoy the yellow of our life more.

We can appreciate our wrinkles and grey hair, because we were lucky enough to live long enough to earn them.
We can appreciate each day simply because we have it.
I’m sure each of us knows someone who left this world before reaching the age we are now.
They do not have this today — but we do.
How lucky we are.

I am not saying we must be happy every moment.
We all have good days, bad days, and everything in between.
But simply being alive today — and having hope for tomorrow — makes me feel genuinely happy and excited for whatever may come my way.

When we live with this understanding — not as fear, but as awareness — something shifts.
My focus did.

And everything I write here, and everywhere else, will come from that place.

I know I am mortal and I will die one day —
but I am alive now, and I truly appreciate it.
I want my life to feel as yellow as possible —
and I want to make the lives of the people around me a little more yellow too.