Beginnings are bequeathed the wherewithal of their existence from the demise of an end. The beginning of an imago is inherited from the end of a chrysalis. Clearing the designated weeds from an area of earth, is the propitious event marking the beginning of a garden. A military border incursion is often the beginning event which precipitates a war-event. The flash of lightning event is the energetic event which is the precursor of thunder.

A beginning is an event which itself has a beginning and an end. Thus birth, as a designated beginning of a life, is itself an event with a start and an end. The beginning of a race is often the sound of a starter-gun firing, which is an event itself having a beginning and an end. The beginning of a solar day could be taken as the sun-rise event, which in turn is an event defined by a beginning and an end.

Being an event, a beginning is in the mind and has a duration. A beginning is an event perceived and located in the context of an awareness's sense of periodicity. It is an interval of time, the magnitude of which is determined by the available technology. Thus human perceptions may be perfectly adequate to estimate that the opening ceremony of a two-week festival was a few hours, but nuclear physics technology would be needed to estimate when the triassic period began some 251 million years ago, and high-speed digital photography would be needed to provide a time estimate of the first wing beat of a bumble-bee, that marked the beginning of its flight to the next flower.

A beginning does not and never can 'start' time. It is an interval of time, not an instantaneous existential impossibility. The cosmos did not begin spontaneously from a singularity and hence start time any more than maggots, in the days of pre-microbiology, appeared spontaneously on dead meat and started consuming it. The beginning of the cosmos is a conceptual impossibility. Events and things have beginnings because they are assembled from the cosmos. The cosmos itself has nowhere to come from.

Beginnings are chosen by awarenesses according to their conceptual priorities. Attempts to identify the beginning of an entity or an event may in many cases be very pragmatically agreed to... as in the starting of competitive races or the beginning of organizational meetings... but in a wide range of scenarios, coming to any sort of consensus as to what should be deemed to constitute a beginning, is less than straightforward. The beginning of a pottery bowl could be chosen to be when... (a) the first clay molecules were geologically formed... (b) the clay was first mined and wedged... (c) the design was first envisioned in the potter's mind... (d) it is first turned on the potters wheel... (e) it first emerges from the kiln as a glazed and functional object... or whatever other event is proposed as appropriate. The beginning of a book could be thought of as the moment it first comes off the press, or the first physical sentence of page one, or when the ideas in the book were first conceived. The beginning of a biological entity might be considered to be at the mitosis cell division stage, or the moment of fertilization, or perhaps the moment of birth or germination. The beginning of a sausage may quite reasonably be supposed to be the instant the delicacy emerged from the sausage-machine, but it might also be that brief interval of time... during which exasperation turned into pragmatism... when Stocky the solitary steer most unwisely got into the vegetable garden for the second time.