There is a peculiar reassurance in beginnings.
To say “this is where it all started” is not merely to locate an event in time. It is to stabilise a world. Beginnings promise orientation: a fixed point from which everything else can be measured, narrated, and justified. They offer a moment before complication, before ambiguity, before things could have gone otherwise.
This attraction is not accidental. It is not even primarily intellectual. Beginnings feel comforting because they imply that what exists is not arbitrary. If there was a start, then there was a reason; if there was a first moment, then there is a story that can be told from it. A beginning reassures us that the world is intelligible in principle — even if we do not yet possess the full account.
But this comfort comes at a price.
Beginnings as Orientation Devices
When we ask for a beginning, we are rarely asking a neutral question. We are asking for an anchor.
Consider how easily the language of beginnings slides into the language of explanation:
“That’s how it began” becomes “that’s why it is the way it is.”
“At the start…” becomes “therefore…”
Beginnings do explanatory work before any explanation has been offered. They frame what counts as relevant, what counts as derivative, and what can be safely ignored. Once a beginning is named, everything that follows is quietly subordinated to it.
This is why beginnings are so effective — and so dangerous.
They compress contingency into necessity. They turn one possible way the world might be into the way the world had to be, simply by placing it first.
The Psychological Pull of Origins
The appeal of beginnings is deeply human.
We are finite creatures, thrown into worlds already underway. We arrive late, inherit structures we did not choose, and act under conditions we did not design. A beginning promises retroactive mastery: if we can locate the start, perhaps we can finally understand what we have been caught inside.
Beginnings also promise closure. If something began, then perhaps it can be completed, fulfilled, or resolved. Even catastrophic endings are easier to bear when framed as the final chapter of a story that once had a clear opening.
This is why questions of origin so often arise at moments of uncertainty or transition. When meaning feels unstable, we reach backward — not forward — in search of solidity.
From Curiosity to Constraint
What begins as curiosity easily hardens into constraint.
Once a beginning is accepted, alternatives quietly disappear. Other ways the world might have been are reclassified as unreal, irrelevant, or incoherent. The beginning does not merely describe the world; it polices it.
This is not because beginnings are false. It is because they function.
They function by narrowing possibility.
They function by organising narratives.
They function by legitimising what follows.
And once a beginning has done this work successfully, questioning it can feel destabilising — even threatening. To unsettle the beginning is to unsettle everything that depends on it.
The Mythic Shape of “Firsts”
At this point, the word myth may begin to hover uncomfortably nearby. That discomfort is telling.
In common usage, myth is taken to mean falsehood, fantasy, or superstition. But in its deeper sense, myth names something far more structural: a story that establishes a world by making it intelligible, navigable, and authoritative.
Beginnings are mythic not because they are unscientific or pre-modern, but because they do this world-establishing work.
They tell us what matters.
They tell us what counts.
They tell us where explanation is allowed to stop.
Modernity has not escaped this structure. It has merely learned to tell its creation stories in different registers.
A Question Worth Suspending
This series will not begin by denying beginnings.
Instead, it will begin by suspending them.
What if the question “Where did it all begin?” is not the deepest question we can ask?
What if insisting on a beginning quietly forecloses more illuminating ways of understanding how worlds come to be — and continue to be?
And what if creation is not something that happens once, at the start of time, but something that happens continuously, through the ongoing establishment of constraints, relations, and possibilities?
These questions will take us through modern cosmology, ancient creation stories, and the strange persistence of origin-thinking even where it no longer does explanatory work.
For now, it is enough to notice the comfort beginnings offer — and to recognise that comfort as something to be examined, not simply accepted.
In the next post, we will turn to the most influential creation story of our time: the Big Bang — and ask what happens when a scientific model quietly becomes a metaphysical origin.
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