I want to tell you something that sounds like a riddle but isn't: you have already died many times, and you didn't notice. The person who woke up this morning is not quite the one who went to sleep. That version is gone. This happens every day, without ceremony.
Heraclitus said you can't step into the same river twice. He was also talking about you.
We grieve permanence in things that were never permanent — including ourselves. The self you're so afraid to lose is already leaving.
I've been thinking about Plato's categories — the things that truly exist versus the things that only seem to. He put the body in the second pile. The appetites, the cravings, the things that feel so urgent at 2am — he considered those barely real. I don't know if he was right, but I find it useful. When I'm white-knuckling something that's already half-gone, it helps to ask: how real is this, actually?
Here's the part I want you to sit with: if everything is in motion — bodies, circumstances, even who we are — then the work is not to hold on. The work is to stay clear enough, present enough, intact enough, that the motion doesn't take the best of you with it. Plato lived to eighty-one. Not by clinging, but by tending carefully to what actually mattered.
The question isn't how long. It's whether the person doing the living is still genuinely there.
I'm not ready to let go of you, or of myself. But I'm trying to love what's here now — not the permanent version, because there isn't one. Just this.
Yours, in flux and on purpose —