Nothing Lasts Forever (And That’s Perfectly Okay)
I have been thinking about a lot lately. But most times, my mind could only think of one thing in particular: separation.
To say that the world is designed under one grand cosmic plan is an understatement. I mean, just imagine the tiniest detail of the universe or how our body works synchronically with all its working parts and how we meet people who we never knew existed until they do in a fraction of second, in an accidental gaze or a casual conversation.
Everything seems to be created in a grandiose, complex manner no matter how simple and uncomplicated things look. Perhaps, the simplicity of how things operate is the very thing that makes us ignorant of the one law that governs all things: nothing lasts forever.
Flowers wilt and plants die. Animals go scarce because of consumption. The body’s cells wear off in the passing of age. The once full of joie de vivre youth grows up. People come and go.
Nothing lasts forever.
If one would calculate the number of people an individual could meet in a lifetime that would be 25,200 people in 75 years, granting that a person would meet one person every day since he or she is born. Imagine, 25,200 people and only a slight percent of them could be rolled into the universal categories of people that should exist in your life. The ones you love, the ones you hurt, the ones who hurt you, the ones who taught you, the ones who inspired you, the ones who stayed, the ones who left. 25,200 people and one day it’s either they go first out of your life or you’ll do in theirs. The point is, in a person’s lifetime, one will get to live with 25,200 potential separations. Just thinking about it, I no longer want to go on with the other probable implications of dealing with separation in a manner so often and inevitable.
Why do we have to meet people we cannot keep? Is this to remind us of the fact that, no matter how abled we are as human beings in crafting tangibly beautiful things, at the end of the day we are still as fragile as all the things that depend on the forces we cannot control?
How unfortunate it is to pour ourselves out to some people only to be separated with them and eventually walk on this same earth as strangers once again. But at the same time, how fortunate it is to get to choose few special people to know the contents of our hearts at the time we met them and to welcome them deeply in our lives just when we thought that nobody could see us in a light in which we want to be seen? If these are so, separation then, is just like every law that rules existence: it is two sided, both a curse and a gift.
Separation is a curse because it makes us fear an intense connection with somebody. Just the mere thought of somebody’s future abandonment restrains us from unleashing all that we are to the ones we learn to love. Knowing that separation is a certainty we all have to go through encourages us to deny the things that has truly made us contented and happy. It is a curse because it teaches us that opening ourselves up to some people will always cut through painfully like an open wound that will forever be exposed to those who knew us in a manner so intimate and profound.
Separation is also a gift because it allows us to appreciate the transience of things. It makes us understand that, since nothing lasts forever, it should be an existential goal to make the most out of the time furnished for us with the people we learn to care about. It gives us a tinge of hope that even when we do not get to stay in some people’s lives and will be reduced to distant memories, the way we made them feel will always give them a fresh thug of nostalgia.
Separation teaches us to personify; that things as mundane as flowers, colors, and scents might mean so much, both to the ones who left and the ones left behind. These will help us conjure specific flashes of memories and images as if they are happening again.
Separation at best affirms to us that the heart, in its four chambers, could hold so much from broken dreams to unrequited love, from betrayal to triumph, from the ones you thought will never leave to the ones you never expected to have stayed longer than the ultimatum you have predicted for them.
Separation, therefore, is not entirely a lonely word. Like all else in the lexical expression of the things we hold dear, separation renders a good story both joyful and sad. It envelopes human fragility and strength from the way we learn to take risks just for some people who have truly touched our souls could take a peek of who we are in our most vulnerable and unguarded moments to letting them go when the time comes for them to rightfully leave.
Separation is a tale whose moral lesson is freedom, that one does not exist to be owned and to own just because we were given intimate access to the life of someone. Separation means, at the very heart of it, that while you have to let go of some people to stand on your own, someday, when another right person comes along, you will get to share yourself and all the people that you have met to him/her because you would have never got that far if it was not for all the ones who left you and you left behind before them.
Separation is an interesting anecdote for all of us. It is like saying, “You have met me at a very strange time in my life, but I am grateful, immensely grateful, that you did. So go and etch a part of me in another.”