I’ve been circling this idea lately: if nothing really belongs to us, why do goodbyes hurt so much?
I stumbled across a Facebook short the url for which got lost in the noise, this gave me pause for thought. The quote in the video was:
“What are you afraid of losing, when nothing in the world actually belongs to you? We hold like fists around borrowed light, calling it ours because it stayed a while. But even the sky doesn’t keep its colours. And waves never remember the shores they kissed. So why does your heart tremble at goodbye, when everything you love was only passing through?”
There’s this line that stuck with me: “We hold like fists around borrowed light, calling it ours because it stayed a while. But even the sky doesn’t keep its colours. And waves never remember the shores they kissed.”
It’s an elegy to the way everything is just passing through – people, places, evenings, even our favourite patch of sky.
But here’s the twist: those moments only exist as moments because we’re there to notice them. The sunset doesn’t care if it’s beautiful. The sea isn’t composing a farewell. It’s our awkward, sentimental human brains that turn “light + water + time” into “that evening I’ll never forget.”
So yes, nothing is really ours. The sky moves on. The waves never knew or cared about us. People we love are ultimately just visiting our lives.
What is ours, though, is the experience those visits create – the way we’re subtly rewired by a thoughtful conversation, a train journey where we pause to just look out of the window, that time when crossing a motorway services car park a sunset captivated us enough to stop. In essence: every moment we were present and not distracted by the everyday noise.
Everything passes through. So do we. But for a brief overlap, we get to say: “I was here. I saw this. It meant something.”
That little triangle – you, the moment, and the meaning you gave it – might be the only kind of ownership that actually matters.