Everything You Love Is on Loan

The lamp on your desk will outlast some of the people who have walked past it. The book on the shelf will be in someone else's hands one day, possibly soon, possibly in a hundred years. The coffee mug, the favorite jacket, the route you walk every morning — none of it is yours, exactly. You are passing through, and so are they.

This sounds, on first reading, like a sad sentence. It is, in fact, the most freeing sentence I know.

The honest accounting

Everything you have was given. Everything you love will, at some point, be returned. The body that has carried you through every day of your life is, eventually, going back to the elements. The friendships will end one way or another. The work will be done by someone else, or not done. The house, sold or torn down. The garden, gone to weeds.

This is not a punishment. This is just what it means to be alive in a universe that flows.

Most of us live as though some of this is not true. We pretend the body will hold forever. We pretend the relationships will not change. We pretend the favorite coffee shop, the company, the political moment, the weather of last summer will all stay as they are.

When something we had counted on shifts — the body fails, the friend moves away, the company restructures — we feel betrayed. This wasn't supposed to happen. But this is exactly what was always going to happen. We just hadn't agreed to acknowledge it.

What changes when you do

When you accept that everything is on loan, two things happen.

First, an unexpected softening. The grip on the things you love becomes less tight. You stop trying to fix them in place. You become willing to enjoy the cup of coffee without demanding that it be the perfect cup of coffee, in the perfect light, with the perfect person.

Second, a strange increase in gratitude. The lamp is more vivid. The book is more vivid. The walk to the train, which you have done five thousand times, becomes a small marvel — I am still here. I am walking past these particular trees. I will not always be.

This is what writers and monks and old people have been trying to tell us for a long time. Most of us hear it and nod and continue to live as though it didn't apply to us.

The hardest part

The hardest version of this is the people we love. The partner. The child. The friend who has been there since you were nineteen. The aging parent.

We cannot bring ourselves to look at this directly, most of the time. So we don't. We assume there will be more dinners, more walks, more phone calls. There usually are. And then, one day, there are not.

The practice is not to live in the shadow of the loss. The practice is to be more present at the dinners while they are happening. To call the parent now, not later. To listen to the friend without checking the phone. To be there, fully, in the small moments that make up the relationship — because the small moments, in the end, are what the relationship was made of.

A line to keep

A teacher of mine used to say: if you knew this was the last meal with this person, would you eat it differently?

You do not, in fact, know whether it is. None of us ever do.

The good news is that the question can be asked over any meal, any time. It does not depress the meal. It dignifies it. The meal becomes, briefly, what it actually is — an evening of being together, on loan, while it lasts.

Eat it accordingly.

Most of what we love, most of the time, is asking only that we notice it before it is returned. That is the small, slow practice. It is not difficult. It is just easy to forget.

Tonight, look at one ordinary thing in your life. Recognize, briefly, that it is on loan. Then enjoy it.

That is the whole practice.