Nothing Gold Can Stay

Its amazing how our perception of time has a snow ball effect, each day a seeming faster day due to the increase of perspective. People that I cared about, I find no longer in my life as the year has past. Is it due to a tendency to isolate myself from others when in grief? In many ways I feel that it is just me letting go of things that are not permanent in my life. ‘Nothing gold can stay’ (Robert Frost), if not even gold is an item that can stay then all things artemporalal. I watch as the love that I once witnessed between couples corrodes as if eaten by battery acid. I watch as the relationships in my own life come and go. It’s an endless tide of receiving and letting go. If nothing can stay, then this includes seasons of life, such as our own personal Winters of the Soul. They do not have staying power either. It’s a tide of emotions, possessions, health, companionship that comes and goes.

What is permanent then? Anything? The book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible has put it right that for everything there is a season, all things eventually pass. This is not a negative in life, but a fact. Its upside is that grief becomes for me more bearable as time marches on, old wounds heal, scars fade, perceptions change, nothing not even the night can stay forever.

What then of Love, what then of the hopes of finding that soul mate? C.S. Lewis wrote in his book Prelandra about the joys of eating new fruits (you can put a pun here if you want). The joy of eating a new fruit is in the first bite, when we try to over indulge our tastes with one flavor we quickly become sick, instead of eating only of one fruit your entire life, taste what you have, savor it, know it, and when the time comes for it to pass let it go. If you do not have the ability to let go of such things then your life becomes filled with bile, and you become diseased.

Eventually we loose those we love, whether to death, or to fate, our loved ones do eventually depart from us. I am learning that I need not look for things in my life that are permanent, but look for the satisfaction of savoring the flavor of life and the pleasures that life has to offer.