Made By Missing Pieces
Kintsugi of the soul
Some time ago, we were speaking with friends who proclaimed ‘we miss you, it’s as if a piece of our heart were missing.’
And we could empathize, we too felt incomplete without our long-time friends in our lives. The truth that no day is as golden in its moment as it is in gilded memory is never truer than when the memories are with dear friends or family. The conspicuous absence does leave a hole in one’s heart as you long to laugh together and share each others missed experiences and learn how they and we have grown and improved (or not) in the passing time.
The time apart though, strengthens the love we feel for each other in a way that constant exposure does not. It is like having your cake and eating it too. You may enjoy the very best of those you love, make wonderful memories and experiences together and then leave them to their idiosyncrasies, and you to yours. This is the power of love being a temporal and not geographic.
And this is the defining difference between absence and loss. With absence, we live contented that one day we will again visit this path in want of wear and renew life with someone we know well and enjoy.
But with loss… we are confronted with ONLY ever having the cherished memories. Though we long to hear their voices and laughter, breathe the air they do and enjoy the warmth of their firm embrace, we know that have passed into only memory. Nothing new can ever come from the coupling of these two unique sparks. It could mean losing the inspiration they gave or the feeling of security and safety that just does not have the same power in memory as it does in presence. Love’s temporal nature again softens the absence, but cannot take the sting away entirely.
We all live with loss and while it is not all that we are, it does contribute to who we are. Some loss is tolerable by anyone, but too much, or too sensitive a loss and we are rendered a basket-case. In any case, absence and loss inform who we become as a human soul and it behooves us to not just cope with the missing pieces, but embrace and celebrate them.
Better is a thing at the end than the beginning, after all. Or, in the parlance of our times, ‘better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all.’
Welcoming comments and critique since 1984