सर्वभूतानि कौन्तेय प्रकृतिं यान्ति मामिकाम्।कल्पक्षये पुनस्तानि कल्पादौ विसृजाम्यहम्॥
sarva-bhūtāni kaunteya prakṛtiṃ yānti māmikāmkalpa-kṣaye punas tāni kalpādau visṛjāmyaham
Word by word
The verse says
All beings go into my nature at the end of an age, Arjuna. And at the beginning of the next age, I send them out again.
In plain words
The cycle, stated without drama.
In, at the end. Out, at the beginning. Nothing is lost between the two.
The word for sending out is the same one used for creation itself — a release, not a construction.
Where you've felt this · in community
Every year the festival pandal goes up on the same corner. Every year it comes down, and the corner is just a corner again. The bamboo gets stored behind somebody's house. Nobody stands there in the empty week feeling that something has been destroyed. Everybody knows the date it goes up next.
Going deeper
Whether an ending is a loss depends entirely on whether there is a next time, and that is what a cycle provides.
The scale here is enormous — ages, not years — but the logic is the same one that lets a town take down a festival without mourning. Nothing is being destroyed. Something is being withdrawn into what it came out of, by the same one who sent it out.
It is fair to ask whether that is a comfort or just a longer version of the same problem. If the individual does not come back, cycles at this scale are cold company.
The chapter answers that later and does not make you wait long. For now, the smaller point stands on its own. Not everything that stops has ended, and we are very bad at telling the two apart while it is happening.