World Building

All change is felt as loss

Today is my last day at the office, and my co-workers have decorated my cubicle with streamers and balloons. Folks have been stopping by all morning to ask about my new career and to wish me luck. It’s funny how often we stop to appreciate things — or people — only when we’re about to lose them. In this, I mean not only my co-workers’ appreciation for me, but my own appreciation for the people in my life here.

“All change is felt as loss.” My friend Mae said that on her blog recently, and boy is it ever true. I know that the life that I’m headed for will be more satisfying, fulfilling and exciting than anything that I’ve done in years, and I’m very pleased that I will be geographically close to so many of my best friends. But I haven’t spent the last four years in a vacuum, either. I don’t have very many people here in Michigan who I’m still really close to, other than my parents, but the ones I do have are all the more precious for their scarcity. In particular, Bryan, Sara and Andrea have become very dear to me, and it saddens me to know that I’m only going to see them once or twice a year now — unless they decide to join me out in California, which is more than I can probably hope for. I’ve had dear friends in the past whom I’ve grown apart from, and it’s always heartbreaking. I’m grateful that that didn’t happen with my friends in Cali — Joe and Sarah, Art and Steph, Stina, Heather, Christie — but it’s a persistent fear at the back of my mind: I love these people and I don’t want to lose them.

I don’t often say it in those words, because they make us uptight Americans feel all funny and awkward, but it’s true. I truly, dearly love my friends here, and it hurts to leave them. I don’t want to say good-bye. I want to take them along with me as I start my new life, to keep them close to me forever … but I can’t. They can’t live their lives for me — and I can’t stay here to live my life for them. And so we part, in the joyful hope of better lives for each of us and the bitter sorrow of knowing that our paths no longer run beside each other.

Dammit, now I’m crying. But then, Tolkien said it best: “I will not say, ‘Do not weep,’ for not all tears are evil.”

All change is felt as loss — even the good kind. A month from now school will start, and I’ll be fully caught up in my new life. Six months from now I’ll have settled into some sort of routine and will, I suspect, be very glad of the choice that I made to go. I keep telling myself that, as scary and often sad as this transition is, it would be far, far worse if the opportunity had never come. If I’d seen my hopes fall apart again, after so much time and money invested in trying to get this job … well. The sort of black despair I would have fallen into is not something anyone would have wanted to see. Things truly are better this way. This is good. This is right.

But today I will weep for the friends I’m leaving … because this new chance for growth doesn’t come without a price. And it’s a price I’m feeling very keenly today.

“Most certainly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains by itself alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit.” -John 12:24 (World English Bible)