Olivia Geitman ’28
Mediations on People, Places, and Impermanence
The day after you get home from vacation, there’s a sort of empty feeling in your chest. Maybe it’s boredom, or maybe it’s longing, but it’s there and there’s not much that returning to your regular life can do to make it go away. The switch from exciting to familiar almost makes ‘familiar’ seem like a sensation that you were glad to have finally shaken off. Familiar feels just as foreign as exciting felt before that too became familiar.
Then that empty feeling fades. You go back to your regular routine, your chores and your hobbies, your schedule and your friends. It’s easier to appreciate the life that you live and the space that you occupy. It’s easier to be fulfilled by existing in no particularly extraordinary way. That feeling now seems kind of silly. It was just a vacation, or it was just summer break, or Christmas, or your birthday. It was just an experience.
You may miss an experience, but that feeling fades even faster than that empty feeling in your chest. There’s no way to fully exist in a moment if your mind exists in another, and you know that time can’t be turned back. It’s life’s impermanence that makes soaking up every one of its experiences so important. The temporary nature of an experience contributes so much to its value, like watching a sunset or sharing a laugh with a friend. Sometimes, though, it’s easy to forget that a friend can have just as much impermanence as a sunset. We seem to accept that empty feeling in our chests when it comes from the absence of people, rather than let it fade as we do when it comes from experiences. We forget that people are experiences.
If you knew that a friend in your life would be just as temporary as a sunset, or a vacation, or summer break, or Christmas or your birthday, would you still value them as much as those experiences? Would your time with this person be sacrificed, or invested? Maybe the answer is neither, and you would choose to spend your time with someone more permanent. Or, maybe, thinking of people as experiences would allow you to let go of those who’ve been written out of your story. It seems to me that a serious flaw in human nature is the separation of the idea of a person from the idea of a moment in time.
Assuming that there is any permanence to someone with whom you share a relationship inherently involves the assumption of control over that person’s presence in your life. Thus, it’s harder to let go of certain people, to detach yourself from those people and resume life as it was without them. That empty feeling in your chest lasts longer than a day, and your mind wanders away from the present moment in which it’s meant to exist. However, when you start to see people as experiences, that feeling in your chest goes away much faster. You love harder because you know that your opportunities to share that love may be limited. You look back on people and, instead of lingering in memories and longing for moments that have since passed, you deepen your connection with the present and you see what it is that you’ve gained from those people.
There’s no guaranteed finality to any experience, but you wouldn’t refuse a meal just because the food won’t sit on the plate forever, or a trip just because you’d eventually have to come home. So why is it that we assume people’s presence is permanent? In friendships, with partners, people instinctively seem to bet on permanence. There is a comfort in doing this. However, if you do, it becomes easier to lose appreciation for their presence, and lose sight of the value that every moment has.
When you begin to perceive people as experiences, you begin to free yourself from any sense of obligation. It’s easier to let go of those who have wronged you, and even those who haven’t. Absence no longer carves a hole from your chest, but instead answers questions that would have plagued you had to continued to assume permanence.
This perspective is not to be confused with an expectation of absence, or betrayal, or of abandonment. This simply prioritizes the appreciation of moments that often are overlooked, taken for granted, or assumed to be in surplus. It’s easy to tell somebody to “live in the moment,” but I think it’s more complicated than that. I think in order to live in the moment, you have to contemplate the uncertainty of the future, and you have to make peace with that. You have to revisit the past, and you have to make peace with that, too.
Being able to make peace with the future and the past means making peace with yourself because all you are is your experiences. You are the universe experiencing itself. You are the dirt beneath you and the stars above you; it’s where you came from and it’s where you will return. Don’t waste this experience with an empty in feeling in your chest; focus more on living and loving than on obtaining and preserving.
Sometimes, I find myself missing people who used to be close to me. There have been people throughout my life who’s closeness brought me so much comfort, but they didn’t deserve to be close to me. The gentleness I valued so much in people would always find a way to turn into brutality, and the laughs I cherished would always find a way to turn into tears. Missing a person who can treat you so harshly can make you doubt yourself, and it can change the narrative of your inner voice. That voice can tell you one of two things: that you’re stupid for missing someone who doesn’t deserve to be missed, or that that person who hurt you isn’t actually undeserving. Whether you believe the first, the latter, or both, “when you experience a vulnerability such as missing someone, that voice can be cruel. It may push you to avoid connecting” (Firestone). If I dwell on that voice, I want to take down every boundary I set up in respect of myself. I want to take back every line I drew, every step I took towards healing. However, through this process I realize that, in a way, it’s almost impossible to miss a person. I don’t miss them. I miss the way they made me feel. I miss the experiences that we shared together. These feelings and experiences exist in other people, and in realizing that I deserve to have these positive feelings and experiences without having to suffer through so many negative ones, I am able to detach the actual person from the idea of that person, from the things they do or the experiences we shared. I am able to let go.
Works Cited
Firestone, Lisa. “How to Cope With Missing People”. Psychology Today. 23 September 2020, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/compassion-matters/202009/how-to-cope-with missing-people. Accessed 23 October 2024.