Describe a phase in life that was difficult to say goodbye to.
Moving on is never easy.
In fact, I would wager a lot of money it’s the most difficult thing you’ll ever do in your entire life.
We are creatures of habit. All of us. No matter what the naysayers claim. They are chronically wrong.
As such, we like stability. We crave it. We want it more than anything. Because it’s in our nature to desire it.
Once we learn something, a trade, a skill, how to do a job, we become better at it. If only by virtue of repetition, if nothing else.
When we do, we expect to keep on doing it ad vitam aeternam – forever. Alas, that never happens. Even throughout history when people held seemingly one job all their lives, this wasn’t true.
The job market was very stable, giving out an air of perenity, but still the gentle winds of change always blew and took away the hopes of stability of the populace.
The rate of change was much much slower. It took one or two generations for almost imperceptible change to occur. But old men and women always reminded the young ones how things were different in their youth.
This rite of passage is as old as time.
Nowadays, change is so fast that it comes like the whirlwind of the typhoon. It blows through the world, leaving mayhem, wreckage and destruction in its wake.
Change is immanent. It is a fixture of the material world. We are powerless to oppose it. We must not fight it.
We must not fight it even when it takes away all our hopes of reunification with our parents we leave behind when we sail into the unknown of a new world.
Goodbyes are difficult because they are like milestones, like border stones. Once we say them, there is no turning back. All our tears, all our hopes for a quiet, stable life at the bosom of our nuclear family, are gone.
Life opens up in front of us.
And our parents and our friends stay behind.
With each passing moment, with each mile we advance into the certainty of the unknown, their faces more diffuse until a hazy white fog obscures and confines them to our Past.
All change is difficult. All change is fixed. And we can’t change it.
Islam and Christianity have a cosmological component built in: the doctrine of predestination.
Change is at the crux of this doctrine. The whole universe is in motion, at all levels, micro and macro, and so are we.
Götterdämmerung 