The Siesta (1884)

Within a day or two of getting home from vacation, my body stopped cooperating with me.

There was no fever, no head cold, none of the familiar signs that make illness easy to name. Instead, there was diarrhea—persistent, exhausting, and severe enough that after more than a week I began to understand how thoroughly something so ordinary can dismantle a person. I was not merely uncomfortable. I was depleted. Physically, certainly, but mentally as well. The days narrowed around the basic mechanics of the body: drinking enough water, trying to eat, wondering what would stay in me, calculating how far I could safely venture from a bathroom.

Eventually, I asked my brother to take me to urgent care. Tests were ordered, and I am still waiting for the final result that may confirm cyclospora, which at the moment seems a likely explanation. Until then, the diagnosis remains uncertain. The experience itself does not.

For more than a week, my body became the most important thing in the room.

That is an odd experience because, when the body is functioning well, we are remarkably good at forgetting about it. I do not usually think about digestion while teaching a class or hydration while sitting in a meeting. I do not consciously evaluate whether my body can be trusted before leaving the house. The healthy body recedes into the background of consciousness. It carries us quietly while our attention moves elsewhere.

Illness reverses that relationship.

The body moves to the foreground and refuses to leave.

Every decision becomes embodied. Can I go there? How long will I be gone? Where is the nearest bathroom? Should I eat this? Have I had enough to drink? Am I actually getting better, or is this simply a good hour? The world becomes smaller because the body has become larger.

That is what brought me to Ramon Martí i Alsina’s The Siesta (La migdiada) from 1884.

There is almost nothing graceful about the man sleeping in the chair. He has not arranged himself into some elegant pose of repose. His head has fallen sideways. One arm hangs heavily toward the floor. His legs cross without refinement. His body seems to have surrendered itself completely to the upholstered chair beneath him.

Martí i Alsina was working within the nineteenth-century realist tradition, and there is something almost defiant about the ordinariness of the scene. This is not heroic sleep. It is not the idealized rest of a mythological figure or the carefully composed languor of an aristocratic portrait. The man has simply become tired enough to stop performing himself for the world.

The chair is holding him now.

That is what I recognize in the painting.

Illness has a way of stripping away the fiction of control. We like to imagine ourselves as minds directing bodies, rational agents moving purposefully through the world. Western philosophy has spent centuries wrestling with that division between mind and body, but gastrointestinal illness offers a rather inelegant contribution to the debate: sometimes the body simply wins.

There is no reasoning with it.

No amount of discipline can negotiate with an intestine that has decided otherwise.

And there is something humbling about discovering how quickly the structures of ordinary life depend upon the quiet cooperation of the body. Work, travel, conversation, concentration, sleep—all the things I usually treat as matters of intention suddenly became conditional. I could want to do something and still be unable to do it.

The experience made me feel helpless in a way I had not anticipated.

Yet recovery has been equally interesting because it has not arrived dramatically.

There was no morning when I woke and thought, I am well.

Instead, normality returned almost unnoticed.

Two nights ago, I slept through the night.

Then I did it again.

Water began staying in my system.

My appetite began behaving more normally.

Today, I went to work.

That last sentence looks almost absurdly small after more than a week of illness. Going to work is among the most ordinary things I do. I have done it thousands of times. Yet today it felt consequential because I could sit through a meeting without quietly calculating how quickly I could escape the room if necessary.

For the first time in days, I was somewhere without constantly monitoring my body.

And perhaps that is what feeling better actually means.

Not that the body suddenly feels extraordinary, but that it becomes ordinary again.

Psychologically, there is an important difference between pleasure and relief. Pleasure gives us something. Relief takes something away. Pleasure announces itself; relief often arrives through absence. The pain is gone. The anxiety has quieted. The threat has receded. Something that occupied consciousness simply stops demanding attention.

We notice relief by noticing what we are no longer noticing.

That is the feeling I find in The Siesta.

The sleeping man does not look triumphant. Nothing has been conquered. There is no victory pose and no celebration. He has simply reached a state in which he can surrender his weight.

That word—weight—seems important.

For the past week, everything felt heavy. My body was heavy. Decisions were heavy. Leaving the house was heavy. Even the possibility of having to explain why I could not do something carried weight.

Now, finally, some of that weight has lifted.

Looking at Martí i Alsina’s sleeping man, I am struck by the trust implicit in his posture. To sleep that deeply in a chair requires a temporary abandonment of vigilance. His muscles loosen. His hand drops. His head falls. He allows the chair to support what he no longer needs to hold upright himself.

Perhaps that is the deepest relief I feel tonight.

Not simply that I am no longer sick, or at least no longer as sick, but that I am beginning to trust my body again.

I can drink a glass of water without wondering what will happen next.

I can leave the house.

I can go to work.

I can sleep.

None of these things is remarkable until they become impossible.

There is a tendency after illness to speak grandly about gratitude, as though recovery must produce some permanent enlightenment about the preciousness of life. I am not sure I feel anything quite so dramatic. Mostly, I feel relieved.

And perhaps relief deserves more respect than we give it.

It is the quiet pleasure of returning to the unnoticed.

Tonight, The Siesta does not look to me like a painting of laziness or even merely of sleep. It looks like a painting of surrender after exhaustion—the moment when vigilance is no longer necessary and the body can finally become heavy without being burdensome.

The man sleeps.

The chair holds him.

And after more than a week of feeling helpless inside my own body, I finally understand something about the luxury of simply letting go.

Seated Monk (1925)

Seated Monk became the first crack in my certainty.

I have often dismissed Salvador Dalí. Surrealism has never come naturally to me, and Dalí’s carefully cultivated public persona only deepened the distance. The theatrical mustache, exaggerated expressions, and relentless self-promotion seemed less like extensions of an artistic philosophy than the machinery of celebrity. I knew the melting clocks and dreamlike landscapes, but I had largely reduced the man behind them to an eccentric image. I had mistaken the performance for the whole person.

Standing inside The Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg made that dismissal increasingly difficult to sustain. The museum does not present Dalí as a collection of isolated cultural icons. It places his work across the breadth of his life, allowing the visitor to watch him develop, experiment, transform, and repeatedly reinvent himself. The accumulation matters. Seen individually, one of his later paintings can appear cryptic or self-consciously strange. Seen after the disciplined realism of his early work, however, the same painting begins to look less like an escape from technique than an intentional expansion of it.

Painted in 1925, Seated Monk belongs to that earlier period. There are no melting clocks, impossible landscapes, or visual riddles demanding to be decoded. Instead, Dalí gives us an elderly monk seated in profile, wrapped in a heavy, earth-toned habit. His body occupies most of the canvas, yet he does not dominate the scene. He seems enclosed by it. The muted browns, reds, and grays press inward, while the coarse fabric of the robe appears to absorb rather than reflect the surrounding light.

The monk’s face is angular and weathered. His scalp is nearly bare, marked by age and the suggestion of a tonsure, while his nose and jaw project sharply into the dim space before him. The rope around his waist plainly identifies his religious life. Behind him, another figure recedes into the shadowed architecture. The work is representational, but it is not merely illustrative. Even here, Dalí appears interested in thresholds: between foreground and background, body and environment, material life and inward consciousness.

I found myself drawn to the monk because he is not presented as a symbol of radiant spiritual certainty. He looks tired. His robe is worn, his posture closed, and his environment narrow. There is no halo and no obvious revelation. His spirituality is bodily. It exists in fabric, posture, age, repetition, and endurance. Whatever interior life he possesses remains hidden from us.

That concealment feels important when considered alongside Dalí’s later work. He would become famous for making hidden things visible: unconscious desires, unstable identities, sexual anxieties, religious visions, and images that transform depending upon how long one looks. His double images and optical illusions do not merely conceal pictures as clever tricks. They destabilize perception. They suggest that seeing is never as immediate or reliable as we imagine. The mind does not simply receive the world. It organizes, alters, interprets, and completes it.

Surrealism still does not come easily to me, but perhaps it is not supposed to. Its disorientation is part of its argument. Dalí’s later works demand a kind of surrender from the viewer. They ask us to remain before an image after our first interpretation has failed. A face becomes a landscape. A body dissolves into architecture. Negative space acquires form. The stable world begins to reveal the instability that was present all along.

One of the works that spoke to me most deeply was Dalí’s tarot card of Death. Death in the tarot is commonly misunderstood as a prediction of literal dying. More often, it signifies termination, transformation, and the irreversible movement from one condition into another. Dalí’s attraction to such an image makes sense. His entire career seems preoccupied with metamorphosis. Solid objects become soft. Bodies become landscapes. Faith becomes spectacle. Private fears become public symbols.

Death is also the ultimate challenge to perception. It is both completely ordinary and nearly impossible to imagine. We encounter its effects everywhere, yet the thing itself remains inaccessible. We therefore approach it through metaphors: a door, a passage, a harvest, a sleep, or a skeletal figure. Dalí understood the psychological power of such images. He did not resolve death into a comforting explanation. He made it strange again.

Perhaps that is what I had failed to understand about him. I had seen the flamboyance but not the seriousness beneath it. His public image was certainly contrived, but contrivance does not necessarily indicate emptiness. It can also be a form of construction. Dalí fashioned himself as deliberately as he fashioned his paintings. The mustache was ridiculous because it was meant to be ridiculous. It transformed his face into another surrealist object: recognizable, exaggerated, unstable, and impossible to separate from performance.

This does not mean that I now admire everything Dalí made or find every act of self-mythologizing profound. A museum should not require conversion. What it can demand, however, is reconsideration. The strongest encounters with art do not merely confirm our existing preferences. They expose the limits of our judgments.

I entered The Dalí Museum believing I already understood why Dalí did not matter much to me. I left recognizing that I had formed an opinion from fragments: several famous paintings, a theatrical photograph, and a mustache. Standing among works that stretched from Seated Monk to the double images, religious visions, hidden forms, and psychological landscapes of his mature career, I encountered not simply the surrealist celebrity but the disciplined artist who had constructed him.

I was wrong about Dalí.

There is something humbling in writing that sentence, but also something liberating. To admit that a work of art has corrected us is to acknowledge that looking can still be transformative. It means that taste is not fixed, perception is not complete, and judgment need not become a prison.

The Dalí Museum is therefore more than a collection of strange and celebrated pictures. It is an argument for seeing an artist whole. For anyone seriously interested in art, it is a necessary stop—not because every visitor will leave loving Dalí, but because it becomes much harder to dismiss him after encountering the astonishing range of what he could see, imagine, and make.

Pez Dispenser (1984)

Before visiting the Pérez Art Museum Miami, I spent part of the day walking through Wynwood. There, art does not wait patiently within a frame. It stretches across warehouses, rises several stories above the street, wraps around corners, and competes with restaurants, advertisements, traffic, tourists, and the relentless brightness of Miami. The murals are not merely objects placed within the neighborhood; they have become part of its architecture and identity. They transform the act of walking into an encounter with color, scale, and visual interruption.

By the time I arrived at PAMM, my eyes had already been adjusted to the grammar of the street: enlarged figures, compressed symbols, aggressive colors, improvised lines, and images designed to announce themselves before they can be interpreted. It was in that state of heightened visual awareness that I encountered Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Pez Dispenser.

The painting was included among nearly a dozen of Basquiat’s works in Basquiat: Figures, Signs, Symbols. Rather than isolating one famous image, the exhibition placed it within a broader vocabulary of anatomical figures, fragmented language, historical references, recurring signs, and densely layered surfaces.

I knew Pez Dispenser before I saw it.

The image has escaped the boundaries of the canvas and entered popular culture: a black dinosaur with brightly colored plates running along its back, its mouth opened to expose a row of squared teeth, and Basquiat’s familiar crown floating above its head. It is immediately recognizable, even to many who may not know its title or understand its place within Basquiat’s larger body of work. It has appeared on clothing, stickers, hats, decorative objects, and the seemingly endless assortment of products through which art is converted into personal branding.

Yet recognition is not the same as encounter.

Standing before the original, the familiar image became strange again. What reproduction had flattened into a clean cultural emblem recovered the irregularity of an object made by hand. The dinosaur’s outline was not the perfect contour of commercial illustration. It trembled, shifted, and carried the physical evidence of Basquiat’s movement. The creature appeared playful, but not harmless. Its smile was also a display of teeth. Its posture seemed almost triumphant, but its body remained awkward and exposed. The crown announced authority, yet it floated above a figure borrowed from the commercial language of toys, candy, and childhood appetite.

That combination helps explain why Pez Dispenser became iconic. It offers an image that is instantly readable without being exhausted by recognition. The dinosaur announces itself before it demands interpretation. The crown is simple enough to be remembered. The colors are bright enough to attract attention. The figure contains humor, nostalgia, danger, and power within a composition that can be absorbed in seconds and contemplated for much longer.

The title introduces another layer of contradiction. A Pez dispenser is a trivial object, designed to release small pieces of candy through the lifted head of a cartoon character. It belongs to childhood, novelty, consumption, and the fleeting satisfaction of sweetness. Basquiat’s dinosaur, however, appears monumental. He takes a disposable object from commercial culture and grants it the visual authority of a heraldic animal. The crown transforms the ridiculous into the regal.

There is something almost philosophical in that gesture. Crowns do not possess meaning on their own; they designate it. They tell us where to direct our attention and whom to recognize as important. Basquiat crowns the dinosaur, just as the museum crowns the painting by placing it within a gallery. Both gestures involve acts of elevation. An image derived from a candy dispenser becomes worthy of preservation, contemplation, and reverence.

Seen after Wynwood, however, the museum’s act of coronation felt complicated.

In Wynwood, art occupies an unstable relationship with public space. It is exposed to sun, rain, redevelopment, advertising, tourism, and eventual replacement. Its accessibility is part of its power, but so is its vulnerability. At PAMM, Basquiat’s work was protected by architecture, climate control, security, scholarship, and institutional authority. The visual language associated with the street had entered the museum and become part of the canon.

The transition raised an unavoidable question: What happens when the language of the street is brought inside?

The museum preserves the work, but preservation also changes the nature of the encounter. On the street, an image must compete with everything around it. Inside the museum, space is cleared so that it may be approached with deliberate attention. The gallery asks the viewer to slow down. It separates the artwork from the noise of ordinary life and, in doing so, declares that the object deserves to endure.

Basquiat’s painting has unquestionably endured, but it has not been domesticated completely. Pez Dispenser remains too rough, too strange, and too unstable to become merely decorative. Even under museum light, the dinosaur retains something unruly. It has entered the institution, but it has not surrendered all the energy of the street.

The larger exhibition was essential to understanding this tension. Situated among Basquiat’s other works, it was immediately clear why Pez Dispenser had become the icon. It is compact, memorable, humorous, and unusually open to recognition. It concentrates several familiar elements of Basquiat’s visual language into a single approachable form: the crown, the crude line, the collision between popular culture and historical authority, and the coexistence of playfulness and violence.

The surrounding works, however, revealed the inadequacy of allowing the crowned dinosaur to summarize the artist.

Basquiat’s broader practice was denser, more bodily, more historical, and more intellectually restless than the familiar crown-and-dinosaur shorthand permits. Human heads emerged as sites of thought, injury, identity, and exposure. Skeletal figures appeared strained beneath invisible burdens. Words were written, repeated, altered, and crossed out. Anatomy mingled with commerce, race, history, celebrity, mythology, and personal memory. The paintings did not present a single argument. They accumulated meanings, allowing fragments to collide without resolving themselves into an easily consumable message.

What can look spontaneous from a distance reveals extraordinary deliberation when seen across multiple works. Basquiat was not merely making energetic marks or repeating recognizable symbols. He was constructing a visual philosophy from fragments. His paintings suggest a mind processing too much at once: history, language, the body, racial identity, fame, money, injury, aspiration, and the persistent question of who receives recognition.

That depth is easily obscured by the very success of his imagery.

There is irony in the way Basquiat’s crown has become a logo and Pez Dispenser has become merchandise. The artist who drew from commercial culture has himself become a commercial language. His symbols now circulate through many of the same systems of novelty, appetite, and consumption that the work appears to examine. At the PAMM shop, the dinosaur can return to the world of products, appearing on objects that allow visitors to carry a small piece of Basquiat away with them.

This does not necessarily invalidate the work or the pleasure of owning its image. Reproduction allows art to travel. It makes images available beyond the museum and introduces artists to people who may never stand before the original. Yet reproduction also encourages reduction. Basquiat can become the crown. He can become the dinosaur. He can become a style of jagged line detached from the historical and psychological weight that gave the marks their urgency.

The exhibition corrected that reduction. Pez Dispenser may have been the doorway, but the surrounding works revealed how much larger the house was.

Walking through Wynwood before seeing Basquiat made the experience feel particularly appropriate. I had moved from walls exposed to the city into a museum devoted to preservation, from contemporary muralists working within public space to an artist whose once-disruptive vocabulary has become part of art history. The journey did not present the street and the museum as simple opposites. Instead, it revealed how closely rebellion, recognition, tourism, commerce, and institutional power can coexist.

Perhaps that is why the crowned dinosaur remains such a fitting emblem.

It is absurd and authoritative, childish and threatening, commercially familiar and artistically resistant. It smiles while showing its teeth. It wears a crown that may be an assertion, an aspiration, a joke, or a warning. Like Basquiat himself, it has been embraced by the culture without being fully explained by it.

I arrived at PAMM already prepared to recognize the language of the street. I left understanding that Basquiat had developed that language into something far more expansive: not merely a style, but a system of thought. Pez Dispenser was every bit as iconic as I expected it to be. The greater revelation was discovering how little the icon, seen alone, could tell me about the artist who created it.

Self-Portrait Among Churchgoers (1939)

Recently, while walking through the newly expanded galleries at Crystal Bridges, I came across Ben Shahn’s Self-Portrait Among Churchgoers. I had already been admiring the scale of the new spaces and the decision to arrange much of the collection thematically. The galleries felt less like a procession of isolated objects and more like a series of conversations. Works made in different periods and under different circumstances had been placed near one another, allowing meaning to emerge through proximity.

Then I encountered Shahn standing outside a church.

The painting is not dramatic in the conventional sense. No singular action dominates the scene. Several figures occupy the same stretch of pavement, but they do not appear to inhabit it in the same way. The churchgoers seem absorbed in the ordinary business of attendance. Shahn stands among them while remaining perceptibly separate. He belongs to the scene compositionally, yet his attention is directed elsewhere. In his hands is a camera.

That camera was what first held me.

Shahn was known for using a camera fitted with a right-angle viewfinder. The device allowed him to appear to face one direction while photographing something located to the side. The people he photographed were therefore less likely to compose themselves for the lens. He could preserve postures, gestures, and expressions before awareness transformed them into performances.

Erving Goffman observed that when individuals appear before others, they often attempt to control the impression they create. The presence of a camera intensifies that instinct. We straighten, smile, avert our eyes, or arrange ourselves into the person we wish to be remembered as having been. Shahn’s unusual viewfinder attempted to evade that moment of self-presentation. He wanted to see people before they became conscious of being seen.

Yet the camera also announces Shahn’s own position. He is not merely another person outside the church. He is watching. He is physically present among the churchgoers, but his relationship to the gathering has become observational. The camera allows him to remain near while establishing a distance.

I recognized myself in that posture.

I often think about going to church on Saturdays. The thought usually arrives without urgency. It is not a crisis of conscience or the reawakening of some suppressed belief. I do not find myself wondering whether Christian doctrine has suddenly become persuasive or whether I should return to the faith of my childhood. I have not considered myself a believing Christian since my early twenties, more than twenty years ago.

Still, Saturday sometimes retains the faint anticipation of Sunday.

For many years after belief had receded, I continued to attend church. Doctrine was never the only thing holding me there. There was ritual, repetition, music, architecture, language, and the familiarity of gestures performed so often that they no longer required conscious consideration. There were prayers whose words remained meaningful even when I no longer believed a supernatural listener received them. There was the liturgical calendar, with its seasons of preparation, celebration, deprivation, mourning, and renewal. There was the ordering of time itself. 

Henri Lefebvre wrote that rhythm emerges wherever place, time, and the expenditure of energy come together. Church joined all three. It was a particular building entered at a particular hour, but it was also a sequence of bodily actions: arriving, greeting, sitting, standing, kneeling, singing, listening, receiving, and departing. Worship organized space, time, and movement into a repeated pattern. Even after belief departed, the rhythm continued to carry me.

Religion is often discussed as though it were primarily a matter of propositions: whether one believes that God exists, whether Jesus rose from the dead, whether Scripture possesses divine authority, or whether a sacrament conveys grace. These questions matter within Christianity, but they do not explain the whole of religious participation. People also remain because religion supplies calendars, communities, identities, habits, memories, and places in which life becomes temporarily ordered.

My departure from church did not occur through a decisive rejection of those things. There was no final sermon that offended me, no doctrinal dispute that drove me through the door, and no sudden intellectual discovery that rendered the sanctuary unbearable. My disbelief was already old. What changed was the web of relationships and routines that had allowed me to remain.

My grandpa Chuck died in 2019.

His death was not a theological event in any simple sense, but it altered the world in which religion had been situated. Religious traditions do not exist only in books, doctrines, and buildings. They live through particular people. We inherit prayers through voices, customs through households, and sacred stories through those who tell them. A ritual may formally remain unchanged after someone dies, yet its emotional geometry is permanently rearranged.

Maurice Halbwachs argued that people acquire and preserve their memories socially. We remember within frameworks provided by families, communities, institutions, and relationships. My memories of church were not mine alone. They were attached to particular people and to the versions of myself that existed in relationship with them. Grandpa Chuck belonged to that framework. When he died, the memories remained, but one of the people who helped hold them in place was gone.

Then came 2020.

COVID interrupted the physical habit of gathering. Churches closed their doors, services moved online, and congregations were dispersed into living rooms and computer screens. The interruption revealed how dependent religious life is upon bodily repetition. Christianity may describe faith as an interior conviction, but religion is practiced by bodies assembled in common spaces. We speak together. We hear one another breathe. We rise and kneel in response to shared cues. We exchange signs of peace, receive bread and wine, and move through architecture whose design directs attention toward particular objects and meanings.

When gathering stopped, more was lost than the weekly service. The convergence of place, time, and physical action was broken. The rhythm was no longer available to carry those whose participation depended less upon conviction than upon continuity.

That same year, my wife moved out.

Our divorce would not be finalized until 2023, but the marriage had already entered its long period of separation. The lived ending preceded the legal one. This is true of many relationships. Their outward structure may continue after the internal relationship has changed beyond recognition. A person can remain married on paper while already learning to live as someone who is alone.

The same was true of my relationship with the church.

I stopped attending before I fully understood that I had left. No formal act marked the departure. No congregation expelled me. No priest removed my name from a register. No ritual acknowledged that a relationship once central to the shape of my week had ended. I simply stopped returning.

Pauline Boss’s work on ambiguous loss offers a useful vocabulary for such experiences. Some losses resist closure because what has been lost is neither wholly present nor wholly absent. The church still existed. Its doors remained open. The prayers had not disappeared. I could, in theory, return at any time. Yet the relationships and habits that had once carried me through those doors were no longer intact.

There was no final Sunday to mourn because I did not know it was final when it happened.

In 2022, Fr. Steve Wilson died.

A pastor is never merely the representative of an institution. At his best, a pastor becomes a human point of contact with something too large and abstract to encounter directly. The church becomes knowable through the person who speaks the prayers, remembers names, presides at funerals, visits hospitals, listens to confessions, and makes an inherited tradition feel momentarily personal.

When such a person dies, the institution remains, but the path into it may close.

Fr. Steve’s death removed another relationship that had connected me to the church as a lived community rather than merely as an object of intellectual interest. By the time my divorce was finalized in 2023, several of the human structures that had sustained my religious attendance had disappeared or changed beyond recognition.

None of these events alone caused me to stop attending. Together, they formed a sequence of disengagements. Grandpa Chuck’s death altered the familial world surrounding religion. COVID broke the bodily rhythm of gathering. Separation and divorce transformed the domestic context in which attendance had occurred. Fr. Steve’s death severed a personal connection to the church itself.

Each event loosened another thread until the old pattern could no longer hold its shape.

Some endings occur twice: first when the relationship changes, and again when we finally recognize that it has ended.

Perhaps that is why I still think about church on Saturdays. The old rhythm has not entirely vanished. My body continues to anticipate something my mind no longer expects. I can imagine getting dressed, driving to church, entering the familiar architectural vocabulary of nave, aisle, pulpit, font, and altar. I can anticipate the opening sentences and the rise and fall of communal speech. I can hear the sound of pages turning and service leaflets being folded. I know when to stand without being told and when a silence is intended to be filled.

None of this requires belief. Memory can preserve ritual after doctrine has lost its authority.

Georg Simmel described the stranger as someone who is “near and far at the same time.” The stranger is not simply an outsider who knows nothing of the group. The stranger is close enough to understand its customs and distant enough to see them differently. That paradox describes my relationship with Christianity more accurately than either believer or unbeliever.

I am near because the language remains familiar. I understand the rhythms of liturgy, the structure of the church year, the stories beneath the readings, and the theological assumptions hidden inside ordinary phrases. I remain near through family history, education, aesthetic attraction, moral vocabulary, and memory.

I am far because I no longer share the convictions that allow those practices to appear self-evident.

The church is not foreign to me, but neither is it fully inhabitable.

In 2025, I began writing the essays that became Religious, Not Spiritual. The title reverses the more familiar claim of being “spiritual but not religious.” I have little confidence in spirituality as a supernatural category, yet I remain deeply interested in religion as a human one. I am interested in religion’s objects, practices, institutions, stories, gestures, and psychological functions. I remain interested in what people do when they pray, even when I doubt that prayer reaches beyond the person praying. I remain interested in sacred texts, even when I do not regard them as divinely authored. I remain interested in ritual because ritual can communicate meanings that belief alone cannot contain.

The writing was not the beginning of my departure. It was the beginning of my attempt to understand what remained after I had departed.

Alasdair MacIntyre asks, “Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?” When the events from 2019 through 2023 were occurring, I did not experience them as chapters in a religious departure. They were separate losses, disruptions, and transitions. Only later, through writing, did they acquire a shared narrative form.

Writing did not create the pattern, but it allowed me to see it.

In that sense, writing became my version of Shahn’s camera.

Through the essays, I could remain close to the church without pretending to reenter it. I could examine Christianity from an angle: near enough to recognize its internal grammar, distant enough to question what participation had once made difficult to see. I could turn toward art, psychology, philosophy, and history while religion remained within the frame.

The camera in Shahn’s self-portrait is therefore more than a tool. It is a way of inhabiting an unresolved relationship. He is among the churchgoers but does not appear to move with them. He shares their pavement without sharing their direction. He faces one way while looking another.

Yet his method also raises an ethical and philosophical complication. Shahn may have hoped to capture people more authentically by photographing them without their awareness, but no image is entirely innocent. He still selected the angle, determined the frame, and chose the moment. The churchgoers may have been unguarded, but they were not unmediated.

The same is true of memory.

I may believe that distance has allowed me to see Christianity more clearly, and in some ways it has. From outside, I can better recognize the fragility of institutional belonging, the dependence of religion upon personalities, and the degree to which practice is sustained by relationships rather than doctrine. I can see how quickly a rhythm that feels permanent can disappear when its supporting conditions are interrupted.

But distance does not make me neutral.

My view is shaped by affection, disappointment, grief, nostalgia, injury, and gratitude. I do not observe Christianity as an anthropologist encountering an unfamiliar culture. I observe it as someone formed by its language and practices. Even my rejection of Christian belief bears the imprint of Christian categories. The church influenced how I learned to think about guilt, forgiveness, death, service, sacrifice, and hope. Its concepts remain present even when I no longer grant them supernatural authority.

I am not outside in the sense of being untouched. I am outside in the sense of standing at an angle.

This is what makes Shahn’s title so precise: Self-Portrait Among Churchgoers.

He is among them. The phrase acknowledges proximity without claiming identity. It describes neither complete belonging nor complete separation. It names a threshold condition—the state of being present within the field of a community while no longer moving according to its central direction.

I understand that condition.

I am no longer one of the churchgoers, but I remain among them. I remain among them in memory, language, ritual knowledge, and aesthetic attraction. I remain close enough to recognize every gesture, yet distant enough to see those gestures differently. On Saturdays, I sometimes imagine returning, not because belief has revived, but because rhythm leaves traces.

The door remains visible even when I no longer walk through it.

Shahn’s camera allowed him to look without appearing to look. My writing performs a similar function. I turn toward art, philosophy, psychology, and history, but religion remains within the frame. I continue photographing in words the world that formed me, attempting to preserve its gestures before memory arranges them into something too simple.

Perhaps becoming an outsider does not mean that the church disappears.

It means that the angle changes.

Groundhog Day (1959)

Today was a quietly emotional day.

That is the only way I know how to say it. It was not dramatic. It was not ceremonial. It was not the kind of day that announces itself as history while it is happening. There was no fanfare, no administrator stopping by to thank me for the years, no students gathered in the doorway, no speech, no card, no ritual of departure. It was simply the last day I was the teacher of the School Flex Program, and the last day I would teach at Roi S. Wood.

Sixteen of my nineteen years in education have been spent inhabiting that role in that place. That word matters to me: inhabiting. I did not merely work there. I lived a vocational life there. My days had shape there. My students knew where to find me there. My books, pictures, coffee cups, small signs, strange objects, practical materials, and accumulated bric-a-brac formed a kind of visible biography along the walls and shelves. The room became familiar not only because it was used, but because it was cared for. It was a place where students came to finish, restart, repair, escape, return, and sometimes just sit long enough to become ready for whatever came next.

Gaston Bachelard wrote, “Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.” I thought about that today, though not in those exact words at first. At first, I simply felt the truth of it in my body. A classroom is never only walls, ceiling, floor, fluorescent light, furniture, and institutional paint. Not after sixteen years. Not after enough students have crossed its threshold carrying anger, boredom, fear, exhaustion, hope, and the complicated burden of almost being done. Not after enough mornings have begun there, enough conversations have unfolded there, enough crises have been softened there, enough small recoveries have taken place there. At some point, a room absorbs the life lived inside it. It becomes more than space. It becomes witness.

Andrew Wyeth’s Groundhog Day feels like the right painting for this kind of ending. On the surface, it is a quiet image: a table, an empty plate, a knife, a cup and saucer, pale wallpaper, winter light, and a window looking out toward a field. There is no human figure in the room, yet the room feels charged by human absence. Someone has been there. Someone is expected. Something ordinary has been prepared, or perhaps something ordinary has just ended. The painting does not dramatize its emotion. It lets absence gather slowly.

That is what today felt like.

For the past month, I have been stripping away my presence from the Flex room. Pictures came down. Objects were packed, donated, or thrown away. Books found new homes or went into boxes. Items that once made the space feel like mine became things to sort, things to carry, things to decide the fate of. Some of it was practical. Some of it was necessary. But beneath the practical work was a quieter emotional labor. I was slowly removing evidence of myself.

That is a strange thing to do.

A room does not become empty all at once. It becomes empty in layers. First, the walls lose their familiar marks. Then the shelves stop telling stories. Then the small objects disappear, the ones no one else could fully understand because their meaning came from accumulation, not decoration. A thing sits in a room for years and becomes part of the weather of the place. Then one day it is in your hand, and you are deciding whether it belongs in a box, a trash can, another classroom, or nowhere at all.

I did not realize how much of myself was distributed throughout that room until I began removing it.

Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” I have always understood that line intellectually, but today I understood it spatially. Sixteen years is not an abstract number when it has been lived in the same place. It is a thousand arrivals before the day begins. It is the sound of students entering reluctantly, confidently, nervously, or too loudly. It is paperwork, lesson plans, online courses, credit checks, graduation conversations, hard phone calls, small jokes, long silences, and the particular patience required by alternative education. It is coffee gone cold while solving someone else’s problem. It is the daily work of believing that a student’s story is not finished just because the traditional path has become difficult.

That is what the room held.

Flex was not just a program. It was a particular way of seeing students. It was a belief that time, structure, work, trust, and persistence could still make a path when the obvious path had narrowed. It was an educational space built around second chances, but not sentimental ones. Students still had to work. Credits still had to be earned. Hours still had to be verified. Choices still mattered. But the room itself carried a different kind of promise: you may not have finished the way everyone else did, but you can still finish.

That promise shaped me as much as it shaped them.

There is grief in leaving such a place, even when the leaving is right. That is difficult to explain because nothing tragic happened. I am not leaving education. I am not leaving the district. I am not even leaving the work of structure, accountability, reflection, and student repair. I am moving into a new room at the high school, into In-School Detention, into a role that I believe can become meaningful and humane. I can see the shape of the next work. I am already imagining its rhythms, its norms, its possibilities.

Still, something ended today.

C. S. Lewis wrote, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” I do not want to overstate the comparison. This was not death. It was not the loss of a person. But it was the death of a form of life. It was the end of a role that had become inseparable from my adult identity. It was the end of a place that had carried sixteen years of my professional self. Perhaps that is why I did not weep. The feeling was not only sadness. It was disorientation. It was the body realizing that the map had changed.

There should be rituals for this kind of thing.

Schools are full of ceremonies. We know how to mark graduation, awards, retirements, first days, last days, athletic victories, academic honors, and public accomplishments. But many of the most important transitions in adult life happen without ritual. They occur in empty rooms, half-packed boxes, silent hallways, and parking lots. Institutions often depend upon the long devotion of people, yet they do not always know how to honor the emotional weight of that devotion when the structure changes. The schedule moves forward. The room is reassigned. The program changes. The next need emerges. The institution continues.

And the person who inhabited the work sits alone in a truck, trying to understand that a chapter has closed.

That was the moment when the weight of it all finally fell on me. I had finished what needed to be finished at Roi. My desk was ready to be delivered to my new room at the high school. The old space was behind me, the next space ahead of me, and I sat there in the truck, not crying, not speaking, not doing anything useful. I just sat.

There are moments when stillness is the only honest response.

That truck became a threshold. Behind me was Flex and Roi S. Wood. Ahead of me was ISD and the high school. Beside me, or behind me, was the desk itself, a practical object made symbolic by circumstance. I was not leaving everything behind. Some part of the old work was being carried forward. The desk that had belonged to one version of my teaching life would now enter another. It would stand in a different room, under different lights, serving a different purpose. Maybe I will too.

That is the paradox of transition. We leave and carry at the same time.

In Wyeth’s Groundhog Day, the window matters as much as the table. Inside, there is stillness. Outside, there is land, light, labor, and winter. The room is quiet, but the world continues. That is part of the ache of the painting. Whatever has happened inside the room, the field beyond the glass remains indifferent. The day goes on. Work goes on. Weather goes on. There is no cosmic pause for private grief.

Today had that same feeling. Something immense happened in me, but the world did not stop. No bell rang differently. No hallway altered itself in recognition. No one stood at the edge of the parking lot to say that sixteen years mattered. And yet they did matter. That is the truth I have to claim for myself. The absence of ceremony does not mean the absence of meaning.

Perhaps that is one reason art matters. A painting like Groundhog Day gives dignity to what might otherwise be overlooked. It notices the empty plate, the cup, the knife, the quiet window, the light on the wall. It understands that ordinary things can become solemn when they stand at the edge of absence. It does not need a figure to make the room human. The room is human because it has been inhabited.

My room was human too.

It was human because students struggled there. It was human because I struggled there. It was human because it contained the daily evidence of effort, frustration, humor, patience, and return. It was human because, for sixteen years, it held a version of education that I still believe in: one that does not give up on students simply because they have become inconvenient to the traditional structure. It was human because it gave me a place to practice the kind of teacher I became.

Now that room will become a room again. Someone else may use it. Someone else may arrange furniture, hang posters, store supplies, or pass through without knowing what it once held for me. That is natural. Places do not belong to us forever, even when they shape us. We inhabit them for a time, and then we leave them to other lives.

But leaving does not erase the habitation.

T. S. Eliot wrote, “The end is where we start from.” I felt that today when I finally shifted the truck into drive. The ending did not become real when I took the pictures down. It did not become real when I packed the boxes. It did not even become real when I walked out of the building. It became real in motion. As soon as the truck pulled into the street, there was a before and an after.

Before Flex and after Flex.

Before Roi and after Roi.

Before the room emptied and after the room became a room again.

There was no music, no speech, no blessing, no farewell. Just the ordinary sound of leaving. But by the time I drove away, the world had changed. Not for everyone. Maybe not even visibly. But for me, a line had been crossed.

I carried the desk to the high school. I carried the work forward. I carried the grief, too. And somewhere behind me, in a quiet room at Roi S. Wood, sixteen years of presence settled into memory.

Futbolistas en el llano (1928)

The FIFA World Cup has begun, and today the United States plays its first match. This summer, Kansas City will welcome the world as one of the tournament's host cities, and my brother and I have tickets to attend one of the games. Earlier this year, we made a point of stopping by the World Cup countdown clock during a trip to Kansas City. It was a small pilgrimage of sorts, a chance to stand before a future experience that felt both distant and inevitable.

If you had told me ten years ago that I would be excited about the World Cup, I probably would have laughed.

Soccer was not my first athletic love. I played as a child on teams coached by my father, but my interests quickly moved elsewhere. Baseball captured my imagination first. Then came track and field. Later, I found my way into weightlifting and football. Soccer became one of those memories filed away with childhood, something I assumed belonged to an earlier version of myself.

Yet life has a way of returning us to things we thought we had left behind.

Much of my renewed interest in soccer comes from traveling with my brother. Some of my favorite memories from the last several years have come from the miles we have shared together. Road trips have a way of creating their own traditions, and somewhere along the way soccer became one of ours.

At first, it was simply something he enjoyed. Then it became something we experienced together.

We watched Phoenix Rising in Arizona. We attended matches for the KC Current. More recently, we found ourselves at Sporting Kansas City games. What began as an occasional diversion gradually became something I actively looked forward to. Today, I find myself checking scores, following standings, and watching matches on Apple TV. The KC Current have become my favorite club to follow, though I have developed a growing appreciation for Sporting KC as well.

What surprises me most is not that I enjoy soccer. It is how much I enjoy being a beginner again.

Soccer remains, in many ways, a mystery to me. I understand the rules, but I often struggle to see the deeper strategy unfolding on the field. Added time still feels strange. The clock reaches ninety minutes and somehow the game continues. I cannot always anticipate substitutions or tactical adjustments. Unlike baseball, where decades of watching have taught me how to read a game, or football, where formations often reveal intent before the play begins, soccer still feels like a language I am only beginning to learn.

Oddly enough, that uncertainty has become part of its appeal.

As adults, we spend much of our lives becoming experts in our own interests. We know the history, traditions, statistics, and unwritten rules. We become comfortable within the boundaries of what we already understand. Soccer returns me to a posture of curiosity. It reminds me what it feels like to encounter something without mastery.

There is a particular joy in not knowing everything.

The older I become, the more I realize that openness is not simply a personality trait. It is a discipline. It is the willingness to approach something unfamiliar without immediately dismissing it. It is the recognition that our identities are not finished products but ongoing conversations.

Travel has taught me this lesson repeatedly.

Some of my favorite experiences have emerged from things I never intended to love. A museum I almost skipped. A neighborhood discovered by accident. A meal I reluctantly ordered. A conversation with a stranger. A soccer match that initially seemed like little more than a way to fill an evening.

Life becomes richer when we remain open to surprise.

What I admire most about soccer is its simplicity.

At its heart, the game is simply people and a ball.

The field can be almost anywhere. A vacant lot. A city street. A schoolyard. A beach. A patch of grass behind an apartment building. Goals can be made from sticks, stones, backpacks, or imagination. The game asks very little of those who wish to play it.

Perhaps that is why it belongs to the world.

Many sports require specialized equipment, facilities, or significant expense. Baseball demands bats, gloves, and a diamond. Football requires helmets, pads, and large rosters. Hockey requires expensive gear and access to ice. Soccer strips away nearly all of those barriers. A ball and a few willing participants are enough.

There is something profoundly democratic about that simplicity.

The game belongs equally to children in wealthy suburbs and children in crowded cities. It can be played in places of abundance and places of scarcity. It crosses borders with remarkable ease because its essential requirements are so modest. In a world increasingly divided by economics, politics, language, and culture, soccer remains one of the few truly universal activities.

As the World Cup unfolds in Kansas City, I find myself thinking about that universality.

Soon, people from every corner of the globe will gather in the Midwest. They will arrive speaking different languages and carrying different histories. They will wear different colors, sing different songs, and cheer for different nations. Yet for ninety minutes they will all understand the same thing.

A ball.

A goal.

A field.

A crowd.

Kansas City itself feels like a fitting host. Over the last decade, the city has quietly become one of the centers of American soccer culture. Sporting KC helped establish a passionate fan base. The KC Current have become one of the premier clubs in women's soccer and play in the first stadium built specifically for a professional women's team. The World Cup's arrival feels less like an accident and more like the culmination of a long relationship between a city and a sport.

In some ways, my own journey mirrors that story.

Soccer moved from the margins of my attention toward the center, not through a grand conversion but through a series of small encounters. A game here. A trip there. A shared experience with my brother. What once felt unfamiliar gradually became meaningful.

Looking at Ángel Zárraga's Futbolistas en el llano, I am struck by what the painting chooses to capture. There is no trophy. No celebration. No final score. One player stretches upward toward the ball. Another collides with him. A third lies on the ground after a challenge. No one possesses the ball. No one has won.

The painting captures pursuit rather than achievement.

It captures the reaching itself.

The longer I look at it, the more it feels like a metaphor for the best parts of life. Many of the experiences that have brought me the greatest joy were not things I deliberately sought. They emerged because I remained open long enough for them to find me. New friendships. New places. New interests. New ways of understanding the world.

Soccer has become one of those gifts.

Had I remained committed to the idea that I already knew what sports I liked, I might never have discovered the joy of watching the KC Current on a summer evening, attending matches with my brother, or anticipating the arrival of the world's game in a city I know and love.

The older I become, the less interested I am in certainty and the more interested I am in curiosity.

Like the players in Zárraga's painting, we rarely know exactly where the ball will land.

The important thing is that we remain willing to reach for it.

The Bookworm (1850)

Thomas Jefferson once wrote, "I cannot live without books; but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object."

For years, I only paid attention to the first half of that sentence.

Like Jefferson, I cannot imagine a life without books. Books have accompanied me through every stage of my adult life. They helped shape me as a teacher, a student, a leader, and ultimately a scholar. They have filled my shelves, my classrooms, my offices, and countless hours of my time. If I were to inventory the most important influences on my life, books would rank near the top of the list.

Yet as I prepare to move into my new role as an In-School Detention facilitator, I find myself thinking about the second half of Jefferson's observation.

Fewer will suffice.

Not because books matter less, but because I have entered a different chapter of my life.

For nearly two decades, my classroom library has traveled with me. The shelves hold books on educational theory, research methods, leadership, psychology, administration, school reform, and dozens of other topics that have occupied my professional attention. Some were purchased for graduate courses. Others were recommendations from mentors. Many were acquired because I believed they contained answers to questions I was trying to understand.

Together, they tell a story.

Looking across those shelves today feels like looking through a photographic record of my career. Here is the book that accompanied a master's course. There is the text I relied on during my specialist degree. Over there are the volumes that helped me wrestle with research design, constructivism, grounded theory, and educational leadership while completing my doctorate.

Each book represents a version of myself.

The young teacher trying to survive his first years in the classroom.

The graduate student determined to learn more.

The aspiring administrator preparing for future opportunities.

The doctoral candidate staring at a dissertation and wondering if it would ever be finished.

The shelves became more than storage. They became a physical record of who I was becoming.

That is why this process has been unexpectedly difficult.

The task itself is simple. Fill a box. Decide what stays and what goes. Donate books that are no longer needed. Pass others on to colleagues who can use them.

Yet every book seems attached to a memory.

The grief I feel is not really about paper, bindings, or dust jackets. It is the grief that accompanies any meaningful transition. It is the recognition that a chapter of life has reached its natural conclusion.

For years, I was pursuing something.

Another class.

Another certification.

Another degree.

Another professional challenge.

Learning was not merely something I enjoyed; it was a destination toward which I was constantly moving. The books reflected that pursuit. They accumulated because I was accumulating knowledge, experience, and credentials.

Then, almost without realizing it, I arrived.

The dissertation was completed. The defense was passed. The doctorate was earned.

The long climb that occupied so much of my professional life came to an end.

I still read. In fact, I probably read more than ever. My Kindle is full. Audiobooks accompany me on my daily commute. Journal articles arrive on my phone rather than hard copies. Jefferson's words remain true for me: I cannot live without books.

But I no longer need the same books.

That distinction has become increasingly important.

The students who will enter my new room are not looking for texts on educational leadership or qualitative research methods. They are not interested in grounded theory, organizational management, or school finance. Those books served an important purpose in my life, but they are unlikely to serve the students I hope to reach in this next stage of my career.

That realization has forced me to ask a difficult question.

Is this library for me, or is it for them?

The answer is obvious once asked.

If I want students to read, then the shelves should contain books that invite them into reading. Graphic novels. Sports biographies. Fantasy adventures. Mysteries. Stories that connect to their lives and interests. The collection should not be a monument to my academic journey. It should be an invitation to begin their own.

And so I find myself doing something that once seemed unimaginable.

I am giving my books away.

Some will go to young teachers beginning the same journey I once started. Some will find their way into graduate classrooms. Others will be donated to colleagues. A few treasured volumes will remain, reminders of where I have been and what I have learned.

But most will continue their journey somewhere else.

As I pack them into boxes, I find myself thinking of Carl Spitzweg's painting The Bookworm. The scholar stands atop a ladder, surrounded by books, absorbed in study. For many years, I aspired to be that man. I wanted to learn more, know more, and understand more. Those shelves became evidence of that pursuit.

Today, however, I find a different lesson in the painting.

The scholar remains on the ladder.

I am climbing down.

Not because learning has ended, but because the purpose of the library has changed.

The books did what they were supposed to do. They shaped me. They challenged me. They carried me through nineteen years of teaching and a long journey through graduate school. They helped make me the educator I am today.

In that sense, giving them away is not a rejection of the past. It is an acknowledgment that the work they were meant to accomplish has already been done.

There is sadness in that realization.

There is also gratitude.

I will miss the classroom I am leaving. I will miss the work I have done there. I will miss the version of myself who spent years building that library one book at a time. But I know that holding on to every book will not preserve that chapter any more than rereading the final page will prevent a story from ending.

A new room waits.

New students wait.

New challenges wait.

Every reader eventually reaches the end of a book they love. Closing the cover is often accompanied by a sense of loss, a reluctance to leave behind the world and characters that have become familiar companions. Yet the act of finishing one book is also what allows us to open another.

That is where I find myself today.

Standing between stories.

Grateful for the one that has been written.

Hopeful for the one that comes next.

With a box of books in my hands and an unwritten chapter before me, I turn the page.

Girl in Mirror (1964)

The Face in the Mirror

At first glance, Roy Lichtenstein’s Girl in Mirror (1964) appears emotionally simple. The bold colors, heavy black lines, and comic-book aesthetic suggest something commercial and detached, almost artificial in its brightness. Like much of Pop Art, it initially feels flattened, as though emotion itself has been reduced into something reproducible and consumable. Yet the longer I sit with the painting, the less certain the image becomes. Beneath its polished surface is something unexpectedly melancholic.

The woman looks into the mirror, but the reflection does not feel entirely like herself. There is distance in the image. The reflected face appears softer, more uncertain, almost mournful. Instead of confirming identity, the mirror destabilizes it. The painting begins to feel less like a portrait and more like an encounter between different versions of the self.

Perhaps that is why this work resonates so deeply with me right now.

This year marks twenty-five years since my high school graduation. That number feels unreal when spoken aloud. Twenty-five years is enough time for entire worlds to disappear. Some of the people who once defined my daily life are dead. Others have drifted so far away that they survive only as fragments of memory. Former classmates, coworkers, church communities, relationships, and even family connections now feel like artifacts from another lifetime. What unsettles me most is not simply that those relationships changed, but that I changed alongside them.

There is a peculiar disorientation that comes with middle age. One begins to realize that identity is less stable than it once seemed. At eighteen, I imagined the self as something solid and continuous, as though adulthood would simply be a more experienced version of the same person. But time does not merely add years to a stable identity. It alters the structure itself. We become new people gradually enough that we rarely notice it happening until something forces us to look backward.

Reunions do this. Old photographs do this. Returning to former churches or workplaces does this. They become mirrors. We look into them hoping for continuity and instead encounter distance. The people who once knew us intimately knew versions of ourselves that no longer fully exist. Likewise, the selves we remember inhabiting often feel emotionally inaccessible, as though we are trying to reconnect with someone we used to know rather than someone we still are.

W. Somerset Maugham once wrote, “We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love.” I think age slowly teaches us the truth of that statement. Relationships are not fixed entities suspended outside time. They are living things shaped by changing conditions: proximity, shared experiences, institutions, mutual need, memory, grief, and the slow movement of life itself. Schools gather people together. Churches create ritualized intimacy. Workplaces produce shared rhythms and common struggles. Families organize themselves around certain personalities and traditions. Romantic relationships emerge from versions of ourselves that feel permanent until they no longer are.

Then the conditions change.

People move away. They die. Institutions collapse. Priorities shift. Distance, both physical and emotional, accumulates quietly. Even when relationships survive structurally, the people inside them evolve. The tragedy is not merely that relationships end. It is that no relationship can remain untouched by time because no person remains untouched by time.

What makes this realization painful is also what makes it beautiful.

If relationships were guaranteed permanence, we might never fully appreciate them. The ordinary moments that make up a life together would lose their sacredness. It is precisely because things fade that they matter. Every conversation in a hallway, every late-night discussion, every friendship formed through shared place and shared circumstance acquires emotional weight because it belongs to a world already disappearing as we live inside it.

That may be the deeper truth hidden inside Lichtenstein’s mirror. The reflection is not false, but neither is it permanent. The woman looking into the glass and the woman being reflected are both real, yet they are already drifting apart from one another. The mirror captures a moment of recognition haunted by change.

And perhaps that is what all memory ultimately becomes: an attempt to hold conversation with selves, people, and worlds that time continues carrying away.

Place and Proximity

The older I become, the more I realize how many relationships are built less upon permanence than upon proximity. We often imagine connection as something purely emotional or spiritual, as though meaningful relationships emerge independently of circumstance. But much of human intimacy is architectural. It is shaped by places, routines, and repeated presence. Schools, churches, workplaces, neighborhoods, and communities function as ecosystems that create the conditions under which relationships can grow.

Remove the environment, and many of the relationships sustained by it slowly fade.

I have been thinking about this often as I prepare to leave my current role. I know I will miss the people I work with. Some of them have been woven into the rhythms of my daily life for years. We have shared frustrations, laughter, difficult conversations, institutional battles, moments of exhaustion, and moments of genuine joy. There is comfort in familiarity, especially in professions like education where shared experience creates a kind of emotional shorthand. Certain people understand parts of your life simply because they inhabited the same hallways during the same seasons.

And yet I also understand that many of these relationships are nearing their natural conclusion.

That realization hurts, though not in the dramatic way loss is often portrayed. There is no betrayal here. No catastrophe. No singular moment where affection disappears. Instead, there is the quiet awareness that the conditions sustaining these relationships are changing. The daily rhythms that held us together are dissolving. We will no longer inhabit the same schedules, the same crises, the same routines. The gravitational pull of shared place will weaken. Some relationships may endure deeply beyond that transition, but many will naturally soften into occasional messages or distant memories.

There is sadness in recognizing this, but there is also honesty.

Human beings are ecological creatures. We are shaped profoundly by repeated contact. Friendship often grows less through grand emotional declarations than through accumulated ordinary moments. Sharing a workplace for years creates intimacy because human beings are not designed to live abstractly. We know one another through presence. Through recurring encounters. Through occupying the same world together long enough for familiarity to become affection.

I think modern culture sometimes struggles to accept this reality because we romanticize permanence. We want relationships to transcend circumstance completely. When they do not, we often interpret the fading as evidence that the connection was somehow false. But I no longer believe that. Some relationships are deeply real precisely because they belonged to a particular season of life. Their temporariness does not invalidate them any more than autumn invalidates spring.

Heraclitus wrote, “No man ever steps in the same river twice.” The insight applies not only to individuals but to communities. Schools change. Churches evolve or fracture. Families reorganize themselves over generations. Workplaces cycle through entirely new populations of people. Even if one physically returns to a former place, the relational ecosystem that once existed there cannot be fully recovered because the people themselves have changed.

Perhaps that is why returning to old places often feels uncanny. One expects recognition and instead encounters distance. The building remains, but the world inside it has shifted. Former churches feel emotionally unfamiliar after key members leave or die. Old workplaces become populated by strangers. Schools once filled with personal history continue functioning without us. The realization is humbling. It reminds us that no community ultimately revolves around a single person, even while certain individuals may profoundly shape its emotional atmosphere for a time.

This understanding changes how I look at Lichtenstein’s Girl in Mirror. The isolation in the image becomes more significant to me. The woman appears alone with her reflection, detached from any visible environment or community. It feels almost symbolic of what happens when the structures surrounding identity begin to dissolve. We rarely notice how much our sense of self depends upon the relational worlds around us until those worlds begin disappearing.

Perhaps that is part of why transitions feel so emotionally complex. We are not only grieving people. We are grieving routines, environments, and versions of ourselves that existed within those spaces. Leaving a workplace is never merely logistical. It is existential. A particular ecosystem of identity begins to fade.

Still, there is beauty in this too.

The temporary nature of these communities makes them precious. Every shared lunch, hallway conversation, meeting, inside joke, and difficult day survived together acquires greater meaning when viewed through the lens of impermanence. The relationships mattered not because they were guaranteed forever, but because for a brief moment in time, a group of people occupied the same world together and helped shape one another’s lives.

That is no small thing.

The People Who Held Worlds Together

As I have grown older, I have begun to realize that many relationships are not sustained primarily by institutions themselves, but by particular people within them. Churches, families, workplaces, and friendships often appear stable on the surface, yet beneath that stability are individuals quietly functioning as emotional centers of gravity. They organize conversations, preserve traditions, maintain connections, soften tensions, and hold communities together through the force of their personality and presence.

Sometimes we do not fully understand the role these people played until they are gone.

Death reveals this most clearly. When someone dies, the grief extends beyond the loss of the individual. Entire relational ecosystems begin to shift around the absence. Family gatherings feel different. Conversations lose familiar rhythms. Traditions weaken. Certain jokes disappear forever because only one person knew how to tell them correctly. A room once animated by someone’s presence suddenly feels strangely hollow, even when filled with the same furniture and the same people.

What we mourn is not only the person, but the world that existed around them.

I think this is true of churches as well. Some congregations survive structurally long after their emotional center has disappeared, but they no longer feel spiritually alive in the same way. A pastor retires. An older generation dies. Key friendships dissolve. Slowly, the institution remains while the emotional ecosystem changes beyond recognition. One can walk back into the same sanctuary years later and feel like a visitor in a place once deeply familiar.

The same thing happens in workplaces. Certain coworkers become anchors within a difficult environment. They create emotional continuity through humor, kindness, consistency, or shared understanding. Their presence shapes the culture more than policies ever could. Then they retire, transfer, or move on, and something intangible shifts. The institution technically continues unchanged, yet everyone recognizes that something important has been lost.

Communities are often far more relational than structural.

Perhaps that is why grief becomes more complicated with age. When we are younger, loss often feels singular. As we grow older, we begin losing entire constellations of meaning at once. A death or separation does not simply remove a person from our lives; it alters the architecture of memory itself. The emotional geography changes. Certain parts of ourselves become inaccessible because they only existed in relationship to the person who is gone.

I feel this strongly when I think about people I miss. Some were family members. Some were friends. Some were individuals I knew only within the context of a particular church, school, or season of life. Yet each of them held together small worlds that disappeared alongside them. Certain versions of myself disappeared too.

That may be one of the most painful truths hidden inside relationships: we do not merely lose people. We lose the selves reflected back to us through them.

A child losing a parent loses not only the parent but the experience of being someone’s child in an immediate and living sense. Former romantic partners carry memories of intimate selves that no longer fully exist. Old friends preserve fragments of earlier identities we can no longer inhabit except through memory. There are versions of me that survive nowhere except in the minds of people I no longer see or people who are now dead.

This is where Lichtenstein’s Girl in Mirror becomes emotionally devastating to me. The reflected face begins to feel less like a duplicate than a ghost. The woman looks toward herself, but there is uncertainty in the encounter, as though the image belongs partly to another time. The mirror becomes a metaphor not simply for self-recognition, but for memory itself. We look backward hoping to recover continuity and instead discover absence woven into recognition.

Tryon Edwards wrote, “Every parting is a form of death, as every reunion is a type of heaven.” Age teaches how true that is. Human life is filled with continual small deaths: communities dissolving, friendships fading, workplaces changing, churches fragmenting, loved ones dying, identities shifting beyond retrieval.

And yet, despite this, people continue gathering together. We continue building families, schools, churches, friendships, and communities even though history guarantees their eventual transformation. There is something profoundly human in that persistence. We create meaning anyway. We love anyway.

Perhaps because some part of us understands that impermanence does not diminish beauty. It creates it.

The people who held our worlds together could never remain forever. Neither can we. But for a brief period of time, we belonged to one another, and entire emotional universes formed around that belonging.

That is fragile.

But it is also sacred.

The Slow Drift of Time

Not all relationships end dramatically. In fact, most do not.

Popular narratives about relationships often center on rupture: betrayal, conflict, divorce, catastrophe, or some singular moment where affection collapses visibly. But many of the most meaningful relationships in human life fade quietly instead. There is no final argument. No formal declaration. No clear line separating closeness from distance. There is only the gradual accumulation of time.

A missed phone call becomes months without conversation. Shared experiences diminish. New responsibilities emerge. People relocate emotionally before they relocate physically. One day you realize someone who once occupied a central place in your life now exists primarily as memory.

That realization carries a unique kind of grief because there is rarely anything to blame.

I think this becomes especially apparent during middle age. Twenty-five years after high school graduation, I find myself thinking about people I once saw every day who now feel almost mythological. At eighteen, permanence seemed natural. I assumed the people surrounding me would somehow remain emotionally accessible forever. Yet time transformed all of us slowly and independently. Careers emerged. Marriages formed and dissolved. Children were born. Beliefs changed. People moved away. Some died. Others became strangers through nothing more dramatic than distance and ordinary life.

The strange thing about reunions is that they collapse time uncomfortably. You encounter someone whose face is older but still recognizable, and suddenly memory overlays itself onto the present. For a moment you can see multiple versions of the person simultaneously: who they were, who you remember them to be, and who they have become.

At the same time, you become aware that they are performing the same act toward you.

There is something deeply disorienting in realizing that other people carry versions of you that no longer feel entirely real. Former classmates remember personalities, insecurities, ambitions, and identities I no longer fully inhabit. In some cases, they may know a version of me that disappeared decades ago. Yet from their perspective, that self remains permanently attached to my face.

Perhaps that is why nostalgia often feels bittersweet rather than comforting. We imagine nostalgia as longing for the past, but I increasingly think it is grief for inaccessible selves. We are mourning worlds we can no longer reenter because the people who once animated those worlds have changed alongside us.

Former romantic relationships intensify this feeling even more. There are few experiences stranger than encountering someone who once knew you intimately and realizing you now relate to one another almost historically. The emotional immediacy that once defined the relationship becomes archival. You remember loving one another, yet the people who shared that love no longer entirely exist. Time has altered both parties so thoroughly that even memory feels unstable.

Thomas Wolfe famously wrote, “You can never go home again.” The line resonates because home is never merely a location. Home is relational. It is composed of specific people, versions of ourselves, routines, assumptions, and emotional conditions existing together at a particular moment in time. Once those conditions disappear, the emotional world attached to them disappears as well.

This is why returning to former churches, schools, neighborhoods, or relationships often feels uncanny. The physical structures remain, but the emotional landscape has shifted. The past survives materially while becoming emotionally unreachable.

Lichtenstein’s Girl in Mirror captures this sensation with surprising precision. The reflected face appears familiar, yet emotionally distant. The woman sees herself, but the recognition feels incomplete. It is the visual equivalent of encountering an old photograph and simultaneously recognizing and estranging oneself from the person inside it.

I think aging gradually teaches us that identity itself is historical. We are less like statues and more like rivers. The self is continuously moving, continuously reforming, continuously shedding earlier versions of itself. Relationships drift because people drift. Sometimes two people evolve together closely enough to remain emotionally synchronized. More often, they diverge slowly, almost invisibly, until the relationship becomes something remembered rather than something lived.

There is sadness in that realization, but there is also mercy.

Not every relationship is meant to survive every season of life. Some belong specifically to youth. Others emerge only through shared hardship, shared work, shared faith, or shared place. Their temporariness does not make them failures. In many cases, their beauty exists precisely because they belonged so completely to a particular moment in time.

Perhaps maturity means learning not to measure relationships solely by duration. Some people walk beside us briefly and still alter us permanently. Some relationships end naturally because the selves sustaining them no longer exist. And sometimes the kindest thing we can do is allow those earlier worlds to become memory without demanding they remain unchanged forever.

The drift hurts because it is natural.

And perhaps because it is natural, it deserves tenderness rather than resentment.

The Unnatural Persistence of Social Media

Part of what has made me increasingly uncomfortable with social media is the growing realization that it disrupts the natural life cycle of relationships. Human beings evolved within small, embodied communities where relationships had clear beginnings, transformations, and endings. Distance once created closure. People moved away and slowly disappeared into memory. Communities dissolved naturally through geography, time, and changing circumstance. There was sadness in that, but also a kind of mercy.

Social media interrupts that process.

It creates the illusion that relationships continue simply because visibility continues. We remain passively connected to former classmates, old coworkers, distant relatives, ex-partners, and people from previous churches or stages of life long after the conditions sustaining genuine intimacy have disappeared. We continue seeing fragments of lives we no longer meaningfully inhabit. Birthdays, vacations, political opinions, family photographs, career updates, and carefully curated moments drift endlessly across screens, creating the impression of ongoing connection where little actual relationship remains.

Visibility replaces presence.

I think this is one reason social media often leaves me emotionally exhausted rather than connected. It asks human beings to maintain ambient awareness of hundreds of people across decades in ways that feel psychologically unnatural. We were not designed to carry so many partial relationships simultaneously. In earlier eras, many of these connections would have faded gently into memory. Instead, they remain suspended in a strange digital afterlife: not fully alive, yet never fully gone.

There is something haunting about that.

Former relationships become ongoing echoes rather than completed chapters. Old identities remain preserved online long after we have emotionally outgrown them. People continue interacting with versions of us that may no longer exist. In some ways, social media transforms memory into performance. Rather than allowing the past to settle naturally into reflection, it constantly resurrects fragments of earlier selves and earlier relationships for public display.

This feels deeply connected to the emotional tension inside Lichtenstein’s Girl in Mirror. The mirror resembles a screen. The reflected self appears flattened, stylized, curated, and emotionally compressed. Like much of Pop Art, the image feels simultaneously intimate and impersonal. The woman sees herself, but what she encounters is a surface.

Social media often operates similarly. It encourages the construction of visible selves rather than fully inhabited selves. People become brands, performances, or collections of consumable moments. Even grief, joy, outrage, and intimacy become translated into images and status updates. The self becomes something displayed rather than lived.

Guy Debord wrote, “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” That observation feels prophetic now. Increasingly, many relationships exist less through embodied experience and more through mediated representation. We do not necessarily know people anymore; we consume ongoing visual narratives about them.

But seeing is not the same thing as knowing.

There is a profound difference between witnessing someone’s curated existence online and sharing an actual life with them. Genuine relationships require mutual presence, vulnerability, silence, conflict, routine, and unfiltered time together. Social media often simulates these conditions while stripping away their depth. What remains is connection flattened into perpetual observation.

Over time, I found myself wanting less of that.

Not because relationships no longer mattered to me, but because they mattered too much to reduce them into digital maintenance. I began craving smaller, more embodied forms of connection. Conversations without performance. Friendships rooted in shared presence rather than constant visibility. Relationships allowed to evolve naturally instead of being artificially preserved online long after their emotional life had faded.

There is also something psychologically healthy, I think, about allowing certain relationships to become memory. Not every connection is meant to remain permanently accessible. Some relationships belong to particular versions of ourselves and particular seasons of life. To insist upon indefinite digital proximity can sometimes prevent the emotional acceptance necessary for growth.

In this way, social media resists impermanence. It attempts to preserve old identities, old communities, old wounds, and old versions of the self beyond their natural lifespan. Yet preservation is not the same thing as vitality. A photograph can preserve an image long after the living moment itself has vanished.

Perhaps that is why the mirror in Lichtenstein’s painting feels so emotionally distant to me now. The woman recognizes herself, but only partially. The image before her is real, yet flattened into representation. It resembles memory. It resembles nostalgia. It resembles the strange experience of scrolling through the digital remains of former lives while understanding that neither the people nor the selves preserved there can ever fully return.

And maybe part of maturity is learning to let certain things fade with grace rather than demanding they remain endlessly visible.

Conditional Relationships With the Self

As I have reflected more on the conditional nature of relationships, I have come to suspect that the most unstable relationship in human life may actually be the relationship we have with ourselves.

When we are young, we tend to imagine identity as something fixed. We speak about “finding ourselves” as though the self is a stable object waiting to be discovered fully formed beneath the surface of experience. But age slowly undermines that illusion. The older I become, the more I realize that the self is not static but relational, historical, and constantly in motion. We are shaped continuously by circumstance, memory, health, grief, work, belief, community, success, failure, and time.

The self is less a monument than a process.

That realization becomes particularly visible at midlife. Twenty-five years after high school graduation, I find myself increasingly aware of the many selves I have already inhabited. There is the version of me that existed within certain churches, certain friendships, certain relationships, certain classrooms, certain ambitions, and certain fears. Some of those selves feel emotionally close. Others feel almost impossible to recover except through memory.

What unsettles me is not simply that I changed, but how completely certain versions of myself disappeared without my fully noticing.

I think this is part of why reunions, old photographs, and encounters with former relationships can feel so emotionally disorienting. They force confrontation between competing versions of identity: who we remember ourselves being, who others remember us as, and who we have become.

None of those versions align perfectly.

Sometimes people speak to me as though I am still the person they knew decades ago. Sometimes I realize I still internally narrate myself through identities that no longer fit comfortably. There are moments when I feel nostalgia not for events themselves, but for earlier ways of being in the world. I miss the emotional architecture of former selves even when I would not actually wish to become those people again.

This tension reveals how conditional selfhood really is.

The relationship we have with ourselves often depends upon external conditions we rarely recognize until they change. Many people feel secure in themselves when they are professionally successful, physically healthy, spiritually certain, socially valued, or emotionally needed by others. When those conditions collapse, self-alienation often follows. A career change, illness, divorce, loss of faith, aging, or grief can make a person feel estranged from their own identity.

In that sense, we do not merely lose relationships with others across time. We lose relationships with earlier versions of ourselves.

John Dewey wrote, “The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation.” I think there is both freedom and sorrow in that idea. Freedom, because it means identity remains open to transformation. Sorrow, because it means nothing within us remains fully permanent. Even memory is unstable. We revise our understanding of ourselves constantly, often unconsciously.

Lichtenstein’s Girl in Mirror captures this instability with remarkable subtlety. The woman looks into the mirror seeking recognition, yet the reflected image feels emotionally separate from the observer. The mirror does not provide certainty. It creates distance. The reflected self appears almost like a stranger wearing familiar features.

That image feels increasingly true to life.

There are moments now when I look backward and feel tenderness toward earlier versions of myself rather than continuity with them. I think about the young teacher beginning his career. The person trying to belong within certain religious communities. The self shaped by relationships that no longer exist. The individual who experienced particular losses before understanding how much loss would continue shaping adulthood. Those selves are still connected to me, yet they no longer fully define me.

Perhaps that is why aging carries such emotional complexity. We spend much of life becoming strangers to ourselves slowly enough that we rarely notice the transformation until memory forces comparison.

And yet, despite this instability, some thread of continuity remains. Not permanence exactly, but narrative. The self persists not because it remains unchanged, but because it continues evolving through time. We carry fragments forward. Certain values endure. Certain wounds endure. Certain loves endure even after the relationships attached to them have faded.

Maybe identity is less about remaining the same person than remaining in conversation with all the people we have been.

That conversation can be painful. It can expose regret, nostalgia, grief, and estrangement. But it can also cultivate compassion. Age sometimes softens judgment because we begin to understand how conditional all human becoming really is. People are shaped by contexts they did not fully choose. Entire identities emerge from relationships, institutions, losses, and historical moments.

The mirror teaches humility.

The person looking into it and the person being reflected are both real, yet neither can remain unchanged forever.

The Beauty of Impermanent Love

For a long time, I think I unconsciously measured relationships by their permanence. The relationships that lasted were considered successful, while the ones that faded felt like failures or losses to explain. Age has complicated that understanding. The longer I live, the more I realize that impermanence is not the opposite of meaning. In many ways, it is what creates meaning in the first place.

Cherry blossoms are beautiful precisely because they fall.

We understand this instinctively in nature, yet resist it fiercely in human life. We want friendships, communities, churches, workplaces, marriages, and identities to remain stable indefinitely even though everything else in existence changes. But human beings are temporal creatures. We move through seasons. We gather and disperse. Entire worlds form around shared circumstances and then dissolve quietly as life continues unfolding.

Perhaps maturity involves learning to love without demanding permanence.

That realization has changed the way I think about the people I have known throughout my life. Former coworkers, old classmates, church communities, past relationships, mentors, friends, and family members no longer feel like evidence of fragmentation or failure. Instead, they feel like chapters within a much larger human story. Some accompanied me for years. Others only briefly. Yet each shaped me in ways that continue long after the relationship itself transformed.

There is something profoundly humbling in recognizing how many people helped construct the person I eventually became.

A teacher who encouraged me at the right moment. A coworker who made difficult years survivable. A friend who understood a particular season of my life. A former partner who knew parts of me no one else did. A church community that once provided belonging. Family members whose voices still shape my thinking even after death.

Not all of those relationships survived unchanged. Some ended painfully. Others faded naturally. A few exist now only in memory. Yet I no longer believe their temporary nature diminishes their authenticity. Human connection does not become meaningless because it cannot last forever.

In fact, the opposite may be true.

The awareness of impermanence deepens gratitude. Ordinary moments acquire sacredness once we understand they cannot be preserved indefinitely. A conversation in a hallway, a shared meal, laughter during a difficult season, the comfort of familiar routines... these things become emotionally significant precisely because they are fragile.

Emily Dickinson wrote, “Forever is composed of nows.” I think that may be one of the great emotional truths of adulthood. Human life does not unfold through permanence but through accumulation. Meaning emerges through moments gathered together over time, even when those moments cannot remain suspended forever.

This realization softens some of the sadness I feel about leaving my current workplace and drifting from certain relationships. I know many of those connections are nearing their natural conclusion. We may become occasional messages, holiday greetings, or distant memories to one another. That hurts. But the sadness itself is evidence that the relationships mattered.

I think there is wisdom in allowing relationships to evolve honestly rather than trying to preserve them artificially out of fear. Not every friendship is meant to survive every season of life. Some belong specifically to youth, shared work, shared hardship, shared faith, or shared place. Their purpose was not necessarily permanence. Their purpose may simply have been accompaniment.

To walk beside one another for a while.

There is beauty in that kind of temporary companionship. It reflects something essential about the human condition itself. None of us remain permanently. Entire generations pass. Communities reorganize themselves endlessly. Even the self changes continuously across time. Yet despite this instability, people continue loving one another, building families, creating friendships, founding schools and churches, forming communities, and investing emotionally in lives they know are finite.

Perhaps because impermanence does not make love irrational. It makes love courageous.

This is why Lichtenstein’s Girl in Mirror no longer feels tragic to me in a purely hopeless sense. The woman in the mirror appears suspended between recognition and melancholy, aware perhaps that neither identity nor beauty nor connection can remain unchanged forever. Yet the act of looking still matters. The act of recognizing still matters.

The mirror reflects fragility, but also presence.

The self looking into the mirror and the self being reflected may already be drifting apart through time, but for this moment they still encounter one another. That brief encounter contains its own kind of grace.

Maybe that is all human relationships ever truly are: temporary meetings between changing people, made meaningful not despite their impermanence, but because of it.

Becoming Strangers and Meeting Again

I think one of the quiet truths of aging is realizing that human life consists largely of learning how to say goodbye. Not always dramatically. Often softly. Gradually. We say goodbye to places, communities, relationships, beliefs, ambitions, routines, and versions of ourselves long before we fully understand that they are disappearing.

Sometimes we do not recognize the ending until years later.

There was a final conversation with someone who is now dead. A last ordinary day in a workplace that once defined daily life. A final church service before emotional distance quietly settled in. A last moment when a friendship still existed naturally rather than historically. A final version of the self before grief, age, experience, or time reshaped it into something else.

Human beings spend much of life becoming strangers to one another slowly enough that we barely notice the transformation while it is happening.

And yet we also spend life continually meeting again.

That may be the paradox that sits at the center of this reflection. Relationships end because people change, but relationships also exist because people change. Every meaningful connection is an encounter between temporary selves crossing paths at a particular moment in history. Sometimes those paths remain intertwined for decades. Sometimes only briefly. Either way, the meeting matters.

I think this is why memory carries such emotional power. Memory is not simply recollection. It is an attempt to preserve continuity between past and present selves. We revisit old photographs, reunions, churches, songs, and conversations because we are trying to understand the people we once were and the people who once walked beside us. Often what we discover is both comforting and painful: familiarity intertwined with distance.

The mirror in Lichtenstein’s Girl in Mirror captures this beautifully. The woman looking into the mirror and the woman being reflected are connected, yet not entirely reconciled. There is recognition in the image, but also estrangement. The reflection cannot perfectly preserve the self because the self itself is always in motion.

Perhaps that is true of every relationship.

We never truly know a permanent person. We know individuals in process:

people shaped by time,

grief,

work,

hope,

trauma,

love,

belief,

disappointment,

and change.

Even our relationship with ourselves remains unfinished. The person I was at eighteen could not fully imagine the person writing these words now. Likewise, I suspect the person I become twenty-five years from now will look back upon this version of myself with the same mixture of recognition and distance.

There is sadness in that realization. But there is also tenderness.

Impermanence teaches compassion because it reveals how fragile everyone really is. Every person we encounter is carrying former selves, vanished relationships, private griefs, and invisible histories. We are all living among ruins of earlier worlds while simultaneously constructing new ones.

Perhaps wisdom is not learning how to preserve everything forever. Perhaps wisdom is learning how to love transient things fully while they are here.

To appreciate the coworker before the hallway falls silent. To value the friendship before distance accumulates. To recognize the sacredness of ordinary moments before memory becomes the only place they survive. To allow people, communities, and even ourselves to evolve without demanding permanence from what was never designed to remain unchanged.

The older I become, the less interested I am in permanence and the more interested I am in presence.

Not forever. Just honesty. Attention. Gratitude. Companionship while paths still overlap.

Hafez wrote, “And still, after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, ‘You owe me.’ Look what happens with a love like that—it lights the whole sky.” There is something deeply freeing in that image. Love does not become less meaningful because it cannot possess or preserve completely. Its beauty may exist precisely in its willingness to exist without guarantees.

In the end, perhaps the mirror is not asking whether identity or relationships can remain unchanged. Perhaps it asks something gentler and more human:

Can we learn to recognize beauty even in what cannot stay?

I think we can. 

I think we must.

Because the fragile miracle is not that relationships last forever.

The miracle is that, for a little while, we find one another at all.