on last times, leaving, and time sometimes revealing itself

Time usually passes unceremoniously. The present fades into past usually without any grand event to separate them. Eventually too, the recent past becomes a distant past which becomes memory.

This sequence is continuous and slow and thus goes unnoticed. There is no grand announcement to say, ‘This is the start of the future’ and similarly, nothing that says, ‘That is now the past’, and so we move through time in the illusion that nothing ever really stops. Change oozes by, making no fuss.

But, sometimes, accidentally, a line is drawn that labels ‘past’ and ‘present’ as distinct and wholly different. Where 'being' becomes 'used to be'. Where we realise that time has passed or is passing, that we are perpetually moving even though change seems momentary and instant in the moment you notice it.

Leaving a place you won’t visit again, grief, breakups, moving house, the end of a holiday, a haircut. These draw lines in the sand of time and create a barrier that cannot be crossed back again.

This inability being made physical hammers home its more abstract and spiritual significance. We are quite literally walking out of the one way door of a moment and into a new one.

It seems like a metaphor, or poetic license to describe it like this, but in these instances, time momentarily becomes a physical space that the leaver and the left occupy separately. The ‘left’, stays put in and recedes into the literal space of the past, and thus into memory. With your feet firmly planted in the eternal present you will always occupy; they become ‘past’.

As you leave too, in your field of vision, you can see the present and the past co-exist, like the foreground and background of a painting. 

When you walk out of a door for the last time, say goodbye to someone or a place, you become aware that you are occupying a memory. Your future self is there too, watching. You are within a space that from now on you can only recreate. For the final time, it is really there, waiting to fall into memory as you turn your back.

It’s a weird feeling to acknowledge something as the last time and it confronts our denial that there ever is a last time; our world is abundant; we feel immortal despite all evidence to the contrary. And because of the gradual and slow nature of change, we rarely know when things will be the last time anyway.

By acknowledging that ‘this is the last time’, you pull yourself into the future and mark something as finite and over, revealing time as a continuum and that something has stopped here in its tracks and can’t continue with you. This is the unsettling feeling, I believe, that comes with change.

As humans, we know that we cannot get the past back, but we live as if we can. It is unsettling to be confronted with the truth of our finite existence, with the reality that things perpetually fall away.

In these moments, we understand, even fleetingly, the spiritual notion that only the present exists, that the present is all there is, that each moment is perpetually created and destroyed in unison, that everything ends and we cannot go back. Every moment is a room we look at for the last time and cannot re-enter, but this is hard to remember in a place we know will be returned to. Only in physical ‘leaving’ then, it is made real. We forget this epiphany, of course, but in this moment there is existential clarity.

In this moment of 'the final time', when we look at something and try to take it all in, the reality of constant loss is momentarily, overwhelmingly understood.