It's only good because it ends

The limits are our freedom

Jul 22, 2023

Without birth and death, and without the perpetual transmutation of all the forms of life, the world would be static, rhythm-less, undancing, mummified.
-Alan Watts

We spend our entire lives in pursuit of The Good. For each of us this utopian destination is made of different features, and for each of us it changes with time. We dedicate our days and years out on the serious hunt for the place where ease and clarity and success and happiness abound, where we can finally take a deep breath, unpack, settle in and relax. We want nothing more than to arrive at the elusive doorstep of perpetual pleasure, peace, and satisfaction.

Not only are we certain that this place is real and out there somewhere, but we are sure that the singular purpose of our lives is to find it. Our culture convinces us, and maybe we convince ourselves, that anything less than steady and unrelenting Good is an error to address, representative of some personal failing to fix, a blunder to atone for. And in turn, much of our life becomes an inconvenience, a detour, an unfortunate misstep that keeps us from this important and consuming arrival at The Good and whatever that might mean to us today.

And we often find it, don’t we? But actually we don’t, really. Because what we tend to find is not the utopian destination that we arrive to and permanently live free of pain and suffering and all The Bad — but rather what we find are frustratingly fleeting moments of deep peace and overwhelming love and heart wrenching joy amid the wretched and difficult. We find glimpses of success in our work and clarity in our path and confidence in our choices. We have tastes of equanimity and connectedness and staggering awe. We have moments where it all snaps together into a brilliant, golden cohesiveness where everything makes perfect sense and we wonder how we could ever be blind to something so blatant and obvious and glowing and perfect, and then in the next moment we wonder how anyone could ever attempt to make sense of any of this entropic infinitude, at all.

The Good we search for and sometimes find somehow always leaves us. It ends. It always does. The successes we experience, the highs we summit, the peace we taste, the love we share. Sometimes we decide to walk away from it, to opt out. I did this three years ago. I opted out. I gave it all away and sold it all and shut it down, trading steadiness and ease for constant unpredictability and discomfort.

Sometimes we don’t have a say in it at all. Life decides for us that the tides must turn and we are sent to spend time with the darkness, the pain, the discomfort. We are thrust from clarity and contentment into confusion and bitterness. I have been here, countless times. Even if things feel alright on the surface there’s sometimes an undercurrent of dissatisfaction or agitation that prevents us from relaxing into anything, keeping us on edge, frustrated, lost, or scared. And its here, in these moments, that we take the fact of pain and the necessity of opposites, and weave it into mountains of suffering.

Because it seems positively indisputable that the dissolution of that Good that we just had, that was just here, that was just ours, that was just at last proving its existence and accessibility, that was just blooming and opening into all corners of our lives and our experience before clasping shut and vanishing, is our fault. It just slipped through our fingers, we forgot too much, we couldn’t sustain it, we backtracked, we didn’t try hard enough, we fucked up, and now it’s gone. We shudder at our ineptitude and head dutifully back out in search of the place where The Good never goes away.

We really think that what we want is permanent and unending happiness and ease and joy. We curse these shifts, we fear The Bad. We resist change. We fight against endings of anything and everything we treasure. We don’t look at death. We are terrified of the unknown, lest it bring us something undesirable. We cling to the pleasurable in life while kicking the unpleasant with contempt. We run from pain. We turn a blind eye to the finitude of it all, including our own mortality, and instead stay hopeful we will someday arrive at the place where all is wholly Good forever.

I have spent much of my life here, just waiting to arrive at the place where the pain is gone and the good is abundant and smiles proliferate and all darkness is banished and beauty and love abound. And I have found it. I have stood at the mountaintop of pure and blissful awareness and felt my indisputable connection to everything in this cosmos. I have been overcome and shattered by love, I have seen it all make perfect sense. I have lost my sense of self entirely and felt a penetrating peace pulse through my body, I have wept tears of joy for the overwhelming beauty in this life and my gratitude to get to live it.

But as it always does, these moments end. Invariably, I find myself back in bouts of disconnection, loneliness, fear, and envy. I doubt my choices, I struggle with creating and working, I worry about messing it up or what others think, I judge myself, I push people away, I get angry and petty and bitter. And I once again yearn for The Good, perplexed and vexed over why and how and when The Good ended at all.

But what I am learning lately is that I don’t really want the place where Bad doesn’t exist, I don’t really want the perpetual and unending peace. I am learning that it is the ending of all that is good and precious in our lives that make any of it Good, at all.

After all, nothing is possible without its opposite. And though it sounds trite and cliche, it is the fabric of truth that we still always struggle to see. I only know what ecstasy feels like because I know despair. I only know love because I know pain. I only know presence because I know distraction. I only know connection because I know separation. I only know peace because I know war.

Everything that has a beginning has an end. Make your peace with that, and all will be well.
-Jack Kornfield

Where I used to see the ephemerality of the Good as the challenge, I now see it as the gift, as the entire point. Instead of wishing that the Good never leaves and sinking into disappointment when it does, I now count on it to go — I expect its imminent departure. And maybe this sounds morose and drab, but to me it feels mirthful and real and important. Because instead of making the end of it mean something about me, my abilities, my mistakes or my deservedness, I now hold it as the simple truth of What Is.

Vacation is only a luxury because it ends. Joy is important because it cannot persist forever. Gold is valuable because it’s rare. Clarity is illuminating because it fades. Summer is special because soon it will be winter. And though we seduce ourselves into thinking that to have nothing but The Good, in perpetuity, would be exactly what we want, the truth is that we don’t want that at all, because it would erase the very magic of everything we treasure, altogether.

Savej said, “Life may just be about the thrill of free falling with no destination rather than staying at the top just cause it took a while to get there and the view is nice.”

We don’t need to spend our lives fighting and struggling to arrive at some utopia where pain is banished and happiness never decays. And we certainly needn’t blame ourselves for not making it to this imagined and entirely fictional destination, for not holding sufficiently tightly enough to the Good when it reveals itself. We are not the reason it ended. It was always going to end. It has to. We need all that is pleasing and favorable and peaceful and certain to depart or partly dissolve or fully disappear from our life from time to time so that when it surfaces again, we know it’s here. We pay attention. We call it by its name. We recognize its beauty and impact, we cherish it, we feel it, we revel in it, we benefit and grow from it, we share it, we fully and wholly experience it with every cell, every ounce of our being.

So this is what I am practicing right now. To welcome The Good without attempting to corral or keep it. To announce it to myself when it’s here, even in pieces in fragments and minuscule amounts, and look right at it, acknowledge it, see it, respect it. To honor it and embody it and delight in it. And then release it, welcoming its departure, letting it continue its eventual and ongoing transmutation, without resistance.

And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.’
-Kurt Vonnegut

The endings, the limits, the infuriating finitude of all that is Good used to be what I feared and fought against, but they are now the very things that I bow to. Instead of making the fleeting nature of uninterrupted joy, happiness, or peace a frustrating problem to correct for, I now see it as required, as entirely perfect. The endings are now in some way what I cherish most, because I recognize that that is the only thing that bestows preciousness on anything. Life is only precious because it ends. And though I still sometimes wish for an immortal, unending, painless utopia, more and more, I revere the end. Because it is only the guaranteed ending of everything in this life, and life itself, that brings me into screaming presence and reverence with the during, with the living. So I let the dark in because I owe the light to it.

xo, Taylor

It's only good because it ends

The limits are our freedom

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