Steve_Bamlett_blog

Describe a phase in life that was difficult to say goodbye to.

I think saying goodbye to the magic, which is never more than an illusory object of magical thinking, is lifelong. Magical thinking is that form of thinking in which wishes  substitute for the realities they can’t in fact shape, or in some case have no agency over.

In effect, those moments are those where we believe we have achieved ideals that transcend time, in forms we describe as mutual love, visions of ideal beauty or certainty, pass with pain or acceptance so constantly that you would think we would learn effectively to disbelieve them whenever they present themselves. But we don’t, for the effect of doing so would create a condition of living where we feel we are unable to breathe or may give up the bother of doing so.

Another strategy available to respond to those perceived losses is to become an emotional and cognitive miser in toto: hugging into ourselves the remnants of that we once thought of as permanent good in our life.

However, a better one is to understand the failures we mourn are merely mistakes in seeing those things we love in things incapable of love themselves, as are all appearances and tokens of value and sometimes those people who know nothing but appearances in life.

In truth, wanting the enduring magic needs to last as long as we do, alongside our knowledge that time and the onward flow and passage of everything, the beauty of impermanence, is the true home of beauty and love. In fact, both belong more truly to the acceptance of loss and change. In that acceptance, we find states of being that over-ride the longing with inglorious but solid reassurance that beauty and love still matter because we wanted them to, and continue to want them to, and probably are the only reality of beauty and love.

So there is no one phase of life difficult to say goodbye to, for saying goodbye is the condition, difficult because it is authentic, of true love that lives as much in the parting as the meeting. For meeting only appears to be a coming together.

Those who fail in the representation of as much as we mortals know of love is the ability to confront and articulate why sometimes saying goodbye is the only thing we can do given the mutability of all things living and moving. And the goodbye may be either temporary or permanent as far as our lifespan measures permenance. But it must be felt and it must be dared. Else, we will never find that we pass into permanent belief in the love and beauty of life as that which survives our sorry individual beauty and lives on in its mass of potential.

With love

Steven xxxxx