The beginnings

A week ago, as 2025 drew to a close, I spoke about endings, which often leave a bitter taste. To compensate readers, today, at the very start of 2026, I'll revisit the joy that beginnings usually bring us. Even if the President of the United States wants to spoil the start of this year for us.

Beginning, start, debut, premiere, alpha, dawn, foundation, origin, entry, launch. All these words have positive and hopeful connotations. Starting a course, wearing a new coat, beginning a book or a ham. There's always excitement, a desire for success, enthusiasm. There's also a touch of unease: the nerves before a play's opening night, the fear of failure if you don't finish the project you've started, the well-known "blank page panic" when you're about to write a poem, an article, or a novel. Beginnings evoke diverse sensations and moods that make us feel alive. They are stimulating. They say that living is basically about having projects.

The poet we tirelessly quoted during the years of the independence movement, Miquel Martí i Pol, wrote it down, and there's no better way to say it: at the beginning, everything is yet to be done and everything is possible. Begin It's a verb that carries within it hope and faith: we begin because we are certain that we can do what we set out to do, and that it will turn out well. As Benjamin Constante said: "Cursed is he who, in the first moments of a loving union, does not believe that this union must be eternal." It's important to believe in what we set in motion. Later—and we all have experience with this—obstacles, failure, and inevitable frustration will come. Or not! There are projects that succeed, marriages that last, and triumphant struggles.

The important thing, now that we've just untangled a new year in a flash, is to recapture that child who arrived at school at the beginning of the term, with their smock immaculate—all the buttons fastened and without stains—the books freshly covered, the pages clean and polished without a single speck of dust.

And what about the moment we first used the Caran de Ache colored pencils, those beautiful, sharp, and perfect pencils, all the same size, that the Three Kings brought us?

The joy of wearing the sweater we were given, which still smells like the store and has that texture that, after the first wash, will never be the same.

Today is a day to think about beginnings, to relive good feelings: the moment the car was loaded and the journey ahead; the first night you sleep in a new house and you can imagine everything you'll experience in the years to come; when, right there in the bookstore, you open the novel you just bought and read the first sentence, like a promise of all the reading pleasure that awaits you. It's precisely the moment when you become a child again and remember the contagious excitement you felt when Dad or Grandma said the magic phrase: "Once upon a time..."

And finally, there are the beginnings of the truly important things: the first days of falling in love. The first time, as if by accident but intentionally, there's the first contact between two skins; the first kiss, the first "I love you."

And still, the beginning in capital letters: when in a cold, white room, you suddenly feel the furious beat of a small, brave heart and you know that your life has changed forever.

Have a great 2026!