Departure

                                     “Aye fond kiss and then we sever.

                                     Aye farewell, perhaps, forever.”

Robert Burns captures the mighty and yet frail nature of human passion. His “Nancy”, to whom this was written, kept a special April date circled in her diary year after year, all her life. She recalled it was the day she and Robert parted for the last time. She did so for forty years into her old age.

When you receive a little jog as to the fleeting and frail nature of your own life you realize that we are only here for a short time. We are subject to our bodies and locked into a certain morality. Upon reflection, if this is the way of it then it must be as it should be. Therefore our departure is as integral to us as our arrival. We live until we can no longer live and then we depart.

The notion of departure indicates a sense of destination. Departing to something is the stuff of faith and imagination. We build our best sense of it from the truth and value we find in this life. So “love and belonging, and home, and peace and freedom, and maturity in growth” seem to be part of the best of our options. We hope forward without seeing.

Even sensing the inevitability of our departure tempers our lives as we live. Making money for its own sake is then futile. We leave it in the end. Hurting people as we go is crude since we are all here such a short time. Doing things that evade our own realities and thus ruin our ability to pay attention seems cowardly. Wasting time climbing hills that are wearing away is now foolish. Someone has described our lives as painting our masterpiece on the wall of a building slated to be demolished. That is one of the truths.

Once you see that and learn to feel its necessity, you can choose the values, who to love, how to spend our time, what to fear and where to hope. In these fleeting years we begin to assemble the arsenal of eternity. We sow now the seeds of what we shall harvest then.

Even upon our departure we cast an afterglow, for there is more to our lives than our physicality, our mortality and the simple patterns of our years. We are remembered in someone’s diary. We anchor ourselves in the lives of those who value us, and there we do work that is beyond imagining, to strengthen, anchor, guide, companion, encourage and love. Freed from our earthly rounds we herald eternal realms to be yet known.

So “departure” is but one word in long and satisfying sentence beginning with “visionary purpose” and ending with “total completeness”.