moving out & moving on
working through loss and celebration
Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more.
― Marcel Proust
*
“What’s the first essay that comes to mind when someone asks what you write about?”
I paused. Opened my mouth to respond, but the words went missing mid-breath.
Hmmm that’s a good question, buying myself time to think.
Leaning over the off-white granite island, propped up on my elbows, I swiveled in my kitchen chair, enjoying the temporary weightlessness of my lower body.
The air hung thick with heat from the oven, aromatic with cumin and coriander and ginger. Rice bubbled on the stove, frothing over the edges of the pot, like when I would mix vinegar and baking soda in an old Coke bottle with friends on one of those shoeless summer days, before throwing it straight up in the air. Waiting for the bottle to drop.
In the French front window, enormous for an apartment, the branches of a lone elm clicked in the wind. The sun had tucked itself in beyond the horizon and dusk began to settle over the city. Light became muddied and thick. Sky and earth melting into one formless shape. Sweet darkness.
I fumbled for an answer. Like searching for a record at a music store, thumbing through dusty memories. All my past pieces suddenly seeming meager upon scrutiny.
Unsatisfied, my brain continued to search.
Mmmm probably my piece on graduating and growing up. I straightened in my chair as the words echoed in my ears.
The biggest change in my life has been going from seeing friends every day to not seeing them at all.
Studying the fault lines in my palms, I fell into deep thought. Contemplation like jumping into a lake, sudden and completely submerged. A flood of everything I was trying to say, all at once. Splashes of sensation rippling to my toes.
What I really meant was: from having stable, recursive people in my life, to whatever exactly I have now. Friendly with strangers, estranged from friends. A carousel of faces. Everyone just passing through.
Most of my interactions exist online, where the sincerity of words and seriousness of intent is never quite clear. One “read” text away from cynicism. One missed message away from cracking. Unsure how much I matter to anyone, how much anyone matters to me.
It’s hard for me to make sense of how people come and go. How someone can be intimately familiar, then strangely distant. How a human can shape the foundation of the world I walk in, then exist in a far away galaxy. Central characters turn to buried footnotes. Friendships become no more than fossils.
Like an old tattoo, the once crisp edges of a single person’s imprint becomes blurry, more distant. But the ink stains. A reminder of what once was. Of what I could have had if I stayed.
The hole in my heart gets filled, eventually forgotten. And bridges can be built across the canyon of the past. But the fissure, that’s permanent.
Nothing lasts, I suppose. Like a neighborhood garage sale. Everything. Must. Go
The only choice is to become a citizen of loss or stubbornly struggle against its inevitability. To lurk in the corner or step into the dance between grief and celebration. Grief for separation. Celebration that I was here at all to share a little slice of existence.
Everything is decaying, burning up in entropy, but loss is the price we pay for life. I read that dead logs are the most intensely alive place in the entire forest. That’s deliciously wistful, isn’t it?
If this was all wretched and wicked, we wouldn’t be so afraid. Of loss. All this terror is downstream of all this glory.
Beautiful things end, but that doesn’t stop them from being beautiful.
My stomach growled and I smelled dinner again.
“That’s tragic. In a way.”
Huh? I said.
“Not seeing your friends anymore.”
Yeah… it is.
Thank you
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👋 what i’ve been up to:
Last weekend I got dinner with Andrew Plainview, Angie Wang, and Paul Millerd, friends through Write of Passage. Encouragement from people walking a similar path reminds me I’m not (that) crazy. I also went to a stand-up comedy show to support a friend and wrote a letter to my Mom for her 60th birthday.
It’s been another hectic week of work as Noah’s book, Million Dollar Weekend, launches on Tuesday. Working late into the evening, I’m distant from my ideal day but there is much to be learned. I’ve still been working out every day and I’ve returned to guided meditations with Sam Harris’s Waking Up app.
On Friday, I went bouldering by myself. The nerves on my fingers are still smoldering, but it was awesome.
✍️ quote i’m pondering:
Yoga teacher and spiritual leader Sadhguru on the miracles of mundane life:
"Every moment there are a million miracles happening around you:
a flower blossoming, a bird tweeting,
a bee humming, a raindrop falling,
a snowflake wafting along
the clear evening air.
There is magic everywhere.
If you learn how to live it,
life is nothing short of a daily miracle."
📸 photo of the week:
Only no pond…
Thank you for reading!
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You got all my love,
Tommy
Oh, Tommy. What a deep reflection here.
At the wise age of 57, this piece reminds me of a time in my late 20’s when my job was peaking, when I had an amazing group of 6-8 friends, my family was close, and I had joined a country club (golf was my primary hobby). It was all so comfortable and perfect. I wanted to bottle it up and make it permanent.
Then over the course of a year, I was re-org’d into a different job, several friends moved away, and I was offered a job in a city 40 miles away and my playing golf after work went by the wayside. I struggled with what I would come to know as impermanence. That life is impermanent - as your essay describes, and my work was not to dread the impermanence but to accept it and embrace it. To live into the wonderful mystery of it. Over time as I was able to do this, I discovered that, like a tree shedding its bark in order to grow and not suffocate, that impermanence is the byproduct of growth, and that I was outgrowing my old life and way of being one life stage at a time. That my old life was in some way too small for me.
And finally, by 57 I have a collection of friends, from these different stages of impermanence - and that letting go of some old friends made room for new friends and relationships that would become deeper than the ones I was letting go of. And I suspect by the time I’m 67 and 77, one of two of my current friends will become a bit more distant as I make room for the one or two I haven’t yet met - like my sending you this (long) note this am, is one I’m not sending to someone else and a year ago we didn’t know each other - and THAT is wonderful in my book.
The wisdom of impermanence.
OK - all done - sorry for the long note!
“The only choice is to become a citizen of loss or stubbornly struggle against its inevitability. To lurk in the corner or step into the dance between grief and celebration. Grief for separation. Celebration that I was here at all to share a little slice of existence.” Being the same age as James Bailey, having a few decades on you, I have chosen to step into the dance after a lifetime on the sidelines. Ego aside, I will initiate, connect, in order to reach out to those important to me. Always. Forever. The choice to despair loss or maintain the relationships I have is really mine alone. In this day and age, no one needs to be any farther than a FaceTime. Can you repeat the 4 University years of beautiful friendships? No. But with humility, thoughtfulness and a group Zoom, you can keep your besties best. It’s your choice. Love as always, Dad.