The beginning is never promising.
On the contrary disordered and seemingly inconclusive, chaotic, better, entropic. Maybe even competitive.
Beauty and elegance are widely missing and there's no clue suggesting any evolution for the better.
Inside interstellar nebulae, big clouds made of dust and rarefied gases, mainly poor and light chemical elements, especially helium and hydrogen, there's a great ferment but the chaos dismantles matter faster than it can put it together. Attempts and attempts leading to nothing, simply saturating time and space.
It's unknown how long this phase dominated by apparent nowhere could last, probably something that, if evaluated according to human myopic metrics, looks like an unsustainable eternity.
But inert matter and dark void don't suffer the wait, though prolonged to infinity, since they have no conscience about it.
Here's another skilful stratagem at the basis of the casual evolution of the universe, only patience is rewarded.