爱之，则放之于漩涡 • If You Love Them, Release Them Into the Vortex
When I was 19, one of my best friends shot herself dead in the bathroom of her parents' house. That was when I learned that it is possible to lose something you care about in a manner that makes it impossible to get back - that it is possible for you to have something one night and wake up the next morning and it's gone, its disappearance a hole newly-punched into the fabric of your life that you can either try not to look at while it frays and grows slowly wider over time, or learn how to mend. 金継ぎ, kintsugi, performed over the course of a lifetime.
Part of learning how to grow old is about learning how to let go, and about learning that letting go is, perhaps paradoxically, part of caring; it is part of an expression of love and kindness that we are often taught should instead equate to a sort of clinging nurturance that tends to inhibit change rather than facilitate it. There's a memory-cycle in there about how if you really love and care about something, you set it free - or you at least learn to loosen your grip. And I've always had a tight grip on people and things while having a somewhat looser grip on my own sanity, but that is only to say that letting go has never been easy. What do I choose to let go if I find that everything sparks joy? This is my dilemma.
Part of the point of living, of being human, is to change, grow, evolve, experience, fundamentally leave this life different than when we arrived. It is possible to do that without pursuing change meaningfully at all - change is inescapable, no matter how you slice it. But chasing it... chasing it, I think, will always require learning how to let go.