Life is Hello, Life is Goodbye

By Howard Peiper

There are many people out there. More than we can comprehend. They are everywhere we go, and we will meet some of them. Some of these people will naturally establish themselves as an apparent fixture in our lives, and change how life looks to us. This is called a relationship. If the person stays around for months or years, our relationship with him or her might begin to feel permanent. It’s not.

Relationships are conditions, not things. They all have to end at some point, but they will leave something behind for us to keep.

There are different kinds, different styles of rapport between us and them: polite, uneasy, romantic, platonic and confusing. We tend to slot them into distinct types—friendships, courtships, marriages and business partnerships, but they are all fundamentally the same thing. Two people overlap, experience each others’ thoughts and ideas, absorb each others’ values, and learn from each others’ stories. Personalities leak into each other when the people get close enough.

This happens all the time, and it is always temporary. The overlap comes to an end and the parties diverge and drift away. It could be after 72 hours of traveling together, or after a summer internship working together, or after 60 years of marriage. If nothing else ends it, death will. This means that life is essentially a solo trip. We will have this endless parade of visitors, though, which is nice. Characters we could not have imagined will appear, stay for a minute or maybe a few moths or maybe many years, and then leave us to our trip.
Welcome visitors, as a general rule. Their purpose is to aid the solo traveler in figuring out how to enjoy this world. Most people will enter and exit our lives without us noticing much; however, some of them will make a big splash.

Some visitors will be decidedly special. We will know who they are, and the most valuable experience we can have is an overlap with this kind of person. The defining characteristic of one of these people is that they make it impossible for us to remain the same person by the time they make their exit. Each one of these people, by the time our paths diverge, will have changed us in a way that is evident to others who know us. We probably will not recognize quite what is happening at the time, but we will feel something—the sensation of windows opening.

However this particular overlap goes, whatever experiences it’s compiled—whether ecstatic ones or awful ones—a few months or years down the road we are different. We are better. Something that was hard is now easy, something that was daunting is now familiar, or something we were once skeptical about, we now love.

We will be left with some beliefs we didn’t have before. We will value certain things more than we did and other things less than we did. Maybe we have never thought about it, but we have had this happen to us, several times by now. It will happen again and again. We have no idea who is on their way to meet us. They have no idea either.

At any given moment, any time, in any day of our existence, we can look at our whole life as a vast collection of experiences and recognize that all of it adds up exactly to who we have become today. There are those upon whom we became dependent, to a degree we may never appreciate, as well as those we happen to just “run into” while we were out in the world doing our thing. We could have been so many different people based on the nature of these encounters.

All relationships are temporary.

They change form and texture as time passes, and they eventually go. If it’s been a special one, with a lover, an important teacher, a parent, its absence can be a heavy one. Almost tangible. We can feel the presence of their absence. The person is gone, an empty desk, an unused pillow, an open doorway with no one standing in it. But we are still there, and we are better that we were.

Dr. Howard Peiper, N.D., nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, has written several best-selling books on nutrition and natural health. Visit his website at www.walkthetalkproductions.com.

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