Starting at the End

Have you ever started a story from the end?

A few weeks ago, I did it almost by accident. There was a series I had watched many episodes of over the years, though I could not say exactly how many. I remembered characters, scenes, a few conversations, and little else. Large gaps remained between one memory and another, and because I rarely have the time to sit down and follow an entire story from beginning to end, one night I decided to break the rules and watch the final episode first.

I wanted to know how it ended.

Once that small curiosity was satisfied, I thought that would be enough. But something strange happened: now I wanted to understand how they had arrived there.

So I started going backward.

I watched the episode before it, and then the one before that. Little by little, I began undoing the story, as if pulling carefully at the thread of an old shirt to understand how it had been stitched together. Every decision found its cause. Every goodbye recovered its history. Some scenes that might have seemed insignificant in the usual order suddenly carried a different weight because I already knew their consequences.

And, strangely enough, it was not chaotic at all.

It was simply another way of telling a story.

Since then, I have wondered whether there are more things in life that might make sense if we did them backward.

We are used to believing that not knowing the ending is essential for a story to remain interesting. Perhaps that is why the idea of destiny unsettles us so much. We imagine that if we knew when and how our life would end, something essential would disappear: mystery, freedom, the thrill of choosing.

I am not so sure.

Imagine for a moment that you knew your final day. Not every detail of the road, only the final point. You would still not know who might appear tomorrow, which conversation might change your plans, what you would lose, what you would find, or which small decisions might slowly push you toward places you cannot even imagine today.

Maybe then the question would stop being what is going to happen?

And another, far more interesting one would take its place:

How on earth did I end up there?

There is a scene in The Matrix that has always felt close to this idea. Neo faces a simple paradox: if the Oracle already knows what he is going to do, then what is the point of choosing?

Her answer changes the question entirely.

You are not here to discover the choice. The choice has already been made. You are here to understand why you made it.

Maybe life is a little like that.

Perhaps knowing the ending would not ruin the story. Perhaps it would simply force us to pay more attention to everything that happens in between.

So try the exercise sometime.

Start something from the end.

Then slowly make your way back to the beginning.

You may discover that a story does not lose its mystery once you know how it ends.

Sometimes, that is exactly when it begins to get interesting.