Good morning, kiddo (it's 07 Jan 2025)
I don't know if you recognize this feeling, but sometimes you look back on something, a period of your life or so, and you feel it has ended. And it makes one feel... Sad? Melancholic? Nostalgic?
It can be ending one level of education, starting another. You realize this period of your life is over; never again will you be at high school. And if you will, it will never again be at that age. Those never-ending summers of childhood will never come back.
You may wonder if you will ever fall in love again like that special first time. That magical time. Or even if it will ever happen to you.
It can even happen with the ending of a book, a movie, a TV series.
We call these existential wistfulness. Wistful is a sense of longing, yearning, colored by a touched of melancholy. It's like looking out a window on a rainy day, reminiscing about happier times, or dreaming of something just out of reach.
There is a sense of grief with these things. The sense of something that is over and gone. Psychologists sometimes use the term disenfranchised grief: mourning experiences that aren't typically acknowledged as "grief," like the end of a phase of life.
In existential philosophy we call it temporal grief: the sorrow associated with the fleeting nature of time and experiences, lost opportunities.
...<smiles softly>... In a perfect world, here is where I would give you your solution to this. Alas, this is not a perfect world. These things, they are. At best, we can delay them. We can delay aging, go back to school, keep trying to have kids, hope for that person to come back... But eventually... Eventually we have to acknowledge they are as they are, which is precisely the reason we can feel this feeling of temporal grief.
...<thinks, reflects on his own life>... In my case, what I try --try!-- to realize sometimes, is that these things would have become memories anyway, at one point or another. Given that life is finite, some things will stop to happen, or time itself disallows us from having enough time or opportunity to do it again. And then, knowing that, I realize that no matter how many more of those experiences I would have had, I would always have wanted to have more. ...<smiles>... Kind of like how the alcoholic says, "my favorite drink is the next one."
At one point or another, I have to face there will be no more this or that. Or that such and so is over.
Does that "solve" it? ...<shakes head>... No. It doesn't. Sometimes, things just really are sad. When the sun is out and I get to have my picnic, don't I acknowledge that all things come together the right way? Yes. And when, instead, it rains and my picnic is a bust, shouldn't I acknowledge it's gone awry and I would have wished it differently? ...<nods>... Yes.
...<looks at until now untouched breakfast, smiles softly>... Sorry kid. Some talks aren't all "yay! toxic positivity for the win!" Some temporal things in life suck.
....
You know that is precisely why we make the most of today, right? Because today, too, will never come back. We will never be this age with these experiences with these things and possessions again.
Don't miss out on the now.
- Love, Dad
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver
