Adiós is Spanish for “goodbye” or “farewell“.
A goodbye is how all ends, it is also how all begins.
We cling in life to everything and everyone, yet all is temporary, because we are.
Pick up a book, a movie, a song, anything, and you’ll find the flickering hand of time amazingly “immortalized” in each.
As with everything related to yours truly, I get my feeds from music, in this case this amazing Saxophone instrumental by David Sanborn, “Goodbye“.
I had it on loop for a few weeks before I left Lebanon.
I also sent it as a goodbye “present” to the only girl I fell for in Munich.
Recently, I bumped into it again, and I am wondering what else will I have to say goodbye to.
The picture above is of a self-explanatory sculpture by Víctor Hugo Yáñez Piña, a Mexican sculpture.
It is a very interesting and accurate depiction of the one and only road of bettering, self sculpting.
This entails going through the ups and downs, the pains, the wins and the losses.
And what do all these have in common? Goodbyes.
What do Goodbyes do to us? They leave scars, they sculpt us.
It is interesting to see how fleeting everything is, how many small moments we chase in life, how many we greet, meet and send with the fleet.
How far our memories of what happened an hour ago is.
The goodbye we say to the day in the evening and the beginning most of us are ungrateful for the next morning.
That first cool breeze handing us a “déjà vu” feeling.
The first rain when Autumn shows up.
The first snow fall when winter arrives.
The first sun caress when Spring is here.
The smell of fresh coffee.
That first bite of a meal we didn’t taste for a while.
The warm feel of a jacket in a cold day.
The cooling touch of the cold water on a warm day.
The rush we feel when two careless eyes meet, fixate and get mesmerized.
That first kiss, the rush before it, the relief after it, and the lust for it to go on forever (depending on how good it is).
That eargasmic note that shakes our being in our beloved songs.
The laughter of a child suddenly switching our moods up.
The hug we have when we bump into someone we missed.
That sense of relief the moment we get out of a tricky situation.
The gratifying physical pain we feel when we finish a challenging workout.
The unshakable happy flow we get when we find our purpose in life, when we feel useful.
The disappointment and anxiety creeping in when a relationship fails.
The hunting stomach void pain tearing us inside when a beloved passes away.
The dread we face when staring at our own mortality and our constant questioning of the why.
…
So we camp on, we take one step at a time and hope for something beyond the horizon, we pile up experiences and try to keep track of what’s most important to us, yet we get distracted, but most of us manage to learn a few lessons here and there.
One of the important lessons I learned in life in this one.
If I want something or someone, I have to go and get it, I fail most of the time, but this is how I became outcome independent.
Still, in those few successful attempts, I win something far beyond what I subscribed for, a chance to say Goodbye to what was, hope for what can be and smile for what is.
No answer for that! 