It is a well known truism that to love is to acknowledge the inevitability of loss. I’ve been thinking about this recently, and was struck by this quote from an author whom I hadn’t encountered before.
“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”
— From The Painted Drum by Louise Erdrich1
This morning, as I left for work, there were plump, ripe apples on the tree in the front garden of my house. A reminder not just of the changing seasons, but also that things of sustaining wonder can persist and recur.
And, inevitably, a reminder too that sometimes that which is wonderful does not last — and can be taken from you and ruined.
Time is shorter than you remember.
- Via the wonderful Maria Popova ↩︎