Waved farewell to a friend today as they embarked on a new journey in their life. After working all their adult lives, they have made a bold decision to retire early and go to the opposite side of the world. I admire them immensely taking this step, yet there is the fundamental reality that I won’t ever see them again.
Whilst the option of traveling to Australia is always there, the actual times where I will do so will be few and far between. In the eventuality, when I do go I already have many friends there that I need to catch up with, and it’s not a small island now is it?
It’s never been so easy to communicate with people but the understanding that it could be the last face-to-face meeting is always a difficult one to try to understand. It is not sadness, but I feel more a matter of wasted opportunities. All those times when was too busy to socialize now you believe that there won’t be another opportunity to do so. I guess it’s like the same feeling you have when someone passes away, all the regrets about what you didn’t do. Strange as in a way that departure feels almost morbid.
My generation is one of travel. When my parents and their friends they seem to have sacrificed their own desire to travel until much later in life when they were financially secure. But I guess in this day and age with cheap and affordable travel the willingness and desire to travel burns strong within us all.
We get to meet many people, friends around the world that we would never have met 30 or 40 years ago. Yet one thing I found is with the friendship you make there is undoubtedly a goodbye not too far on the horizon. I think this is the hardest thing of all when you meet people that you classes a friend.
We grow with each person we meet, we learn from them, and we become better people. Yet the inevitable sadness about saying goodbye always cast a grey cloud in such a sunny day. We pagans have a saying “ never say goodbye, always say until next time”.
Sometimes saying goodbye is the hardest word of them all.
