No more “If only”

Do it now. Whatever small but terribly important thing you’ve been promising yourself you’ll do the minute you get a few spare minutes – call someone you haven’t spoken to in far too long, tell someone you love them, have that crazy adventure you’ve always dreamed of – go do it right this very second.

I know how busy we all are, scrambling to keep afloat in an economy that seems more determined than ever to pull us under, and that even the most well-meaning heart sometimes can’t do anything but put off the things that matter most. We’ll get to it, we think. As soon as I find a moment I can breathe.

And then something terrible happens, and that moment never comes. You’re the one who gets a call, telling you the last news you wanted to hear, and that item on your to-do list spins forever out of your reach. Someone’s died, or you’ve lost your job, or a fire has eaten up everything you ever owned. You lose your chance, and that item on your to-do list will haunt you no matter how small it was. If only you hadn’t put it off for so long. If only you’d known.

So go do it. If you won’t listen to me, listen to your own mythical future self, who wishes more than anything that you’d done it when you had the chance.

Every little ending of the world

There’s something terribly wrenching about sudden endings, a small but permanent shift where you step out of one world and into another one. Even if the difference between the two is relatively small – a new apartment building instead of the old one, a breakup you hadn’t seen coming – there’s something disorienting about being cut off from the life you’ve been experiencing until just recently. Even though most of the important parts are still firmly in place, it can never quite be the same as it once was. Something that was enough of a part of it to be almost instinctive has ended, and as such is now forever out of your reach.

You wish you’d been warned somehow, because surely a chance to say goodbye would have made the loss easier. You could have made a plan for what you were going to do without whatever it is you lost, or simply taken some time to become accustomed to the thought of letting go. To try and figure out who you are now. But the truth is, there’s never really enough warning. That last step will always feel too final, and you will always wish you had just one more day in the life you’d gotten so used to. It’s in human nature to always want one more goodbye.