Impermanence, it is said by wisemen through the ages, is the only thing we can count on when it comes to the over arching phenomenon of life. Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, told us that change is the only constant some twenty-five hundred years ago, yet we view many of our attachments as concrete, immutable to this very day.

Knowing something to be true and accepting that truth are two very different things. On the one hand, you have knowledge, the ability to conceptualize a theory, to observe it, and to explain it to others. This, however, says nothing of ones ability to accept it. Accepting goes beyond simply an idea, and crosses into territory which is concerned with integrating knowledge into a life, into a practice.

Dylan Thomas’s famous poem tells us to not go gentle into that good night. In other words, resist the inevitable, accept nothing, even with the knowledge that the sum of all of your wishes, all of your desires, trouble not the least bit the order of the cosmos. It’s this concept of acceptance that has vexed philosophers and laymen since the beginning of knowledge and art, since humans started peering through the kaleidoscope of consciousness. To make sense of everything is at once our duty, many of us believe, yet the more we task ourselves with such, the deeper we plunge ourselves into a battle where a victor has already been named. The irony of this futile resistance is too often lost on us, yet the difficulty of keeping it in our purview cannot be overstated.

When Dina and I broke up for the thirty-seventh time prior to the pandemic, I wasn’t quite sure if it would stick, if I could resist the seemingly inevitable, and permanently leave the relationship. If history teaches us anything, it’s that it repeats, and our patterns as a couple had been set in what seemed to be unmovable stone. Both of us were stagnant like two mosquitos trapped in an ancient amber, displaying our toxic patterns to whomever happened to unearth us.

Being unearthed was our fear, so we hid from others, we avoided gatherings, and we avoided our families. To be together meant to be in hiding, and to be in hiding meant reinforcing whatever it was that kept us sick. We are social creatures, after all, and if we do not give ourselves the opportunity to see our behaviors reflected off of others, we won’t have much of an opportunity to modify what society deems unacceptable.

Thus, we were lost on a island characterized by a constantly increasing sense of isolation, quickly eroding at the edges, pushing us closer and closer to one another even as our disdain for one another inched toward some sort of eruption.

If you love something, set it free. That’s been the hardest thing for me, and in the back of my mind, I know that I’ll be actively leaving that relationship until the day I die.

I am not going gently.