Old beginnings and new endings, renewed.

Last year, shortly after catching breath after an enthusiastic “Happy New Year” - shouted randomly to an innocent passerby - I had what I thought was a bright idea for this blog.

I could add a post that started: -“Old beginnings and new endings”

Clearly I was thinking that as the New Year starts the old one fades and that resolute anticipation of the future could also be a time of resonant reflection on the past.

I was thinking dichotomy.

Even if I had no idea either how to spell it (necessitating spell checker if I wrote it) or what it really means (necessitating Wikipedia to check I had written the correct word.)

Wikipedi confirms “A dichotomy is any splitting of a whole into exactly two non-overlapping parts, meaning it is a procedure in which a whole is divided into two parts, or in half. It is a partition of a whole (or a set) into two parts (subsets) that are:

jointly exhaustive: everything must belong to one part or the other, and
mutually exclusive: nothing can belong simultaneously to both parts.

The two parts thus formed are complements. In logic, the partitions are opposites if there exists a proposition such that it holds over one and not the other.
In the community of philosophers and scholars, many believe that "unless a distinction can be made rigorous and precise it isn't really a distinction."

Exactly!

Anyway, my humble dichotomous post (I used google for that) went pretty much un-noticed amongst the rabble of what I usually write until yesterday when I looked at it again. (you can too, here).

Despite the fairly tenuous link to philosophical dichotomy I deemed it worthy of a reprieve.

Of course these are new, old beginnings and new, new endings.

Here, without further to do, three ends from Bitsnbobs 2010.

1. The end of questions.
2. The end of the road.
3. The end of a life.

And here are three beginnings.

1. The beginning of the holiday.
2. The beginning of the end (of waiting).
3. The beginning of my book.