Loss

No pains, no gains. Loss is a part of that. A part of the pain.

Loss is ingrained into us. We lost our wings, tails, claws, and fangs through our long journey of evolution. We shed them and traded for bipedalism and opposable thumbs and larger cranial cavities to hold larger brains. We lose as our species goes through time and as each individual travels through time. We lose therefore we gain.

It is easier to observe loss than experience it. I for one have a very difficult time giving things up. My room isn’t messy because I don’t clean. It’s because I refuse to clean, and I want to hoard everything and lock them up so these memories don’t slip away through my fingers. Many of us do the same thing. We store little pieces of string or bottles. We treasure the broken, physical fragments of the past, dreading any possibility of it being taken away from us. But loss is a way of moving on. It’s a way of gaining.

By losing my determined childhood dreams of being a Kung Fu master, I realized I could become a medical illustrator.

By losing the time I could’ve spent with my cousins, I excelled in school instead.

By coming to Canada, I lost my best friend. But I made new best friends, right here.

By moving to Vancouver, I lost my buddies I’ve known for 8 years. And that was when I realized how alone one can be.

By coming to UTSC, I realized I can have a crew of guy best friends and still be okay with it.

With my decision to come to St. George, I realize how far I’ve traveled and how independent I can be.  

To me, life is about losing what should have been lost. Instead of drying and preserving the dead memories, they should be buried in their rightful place along the path. If everything has to be carried on my back, eventually things get to heavy and I will no longer be able to pocket new experiences.

And of course we never stop losing. Will today’s goals have the same fate as the once indestructible dreams of childhood? Loss is one thing people like to remain almost unrealistically optimistic about. We never anticipate it happening, and we take ages to recover from it. As the Dali Lama once put it, “[we] live as if [we are] never going to die, and then die having never really lived”. Same goes for other things in life. We live as if we’re never going to lose anything, and then regretting what we have not done. One day we’re going to lose our grandparents, our parents won’t be around to support us and our friends might drift apart.

I am not being negative, these are real things that will very likely happen to each one of us, yet we go on never acknowledging the possibility. Are there people who never said “I love you” you their parents? Are there people who waste away at a job they hate, only to realize they never made an effort to make the real dreams happen. Rather to have lived and lost than to missed and regret.

Once upon a time, when I didn’t understand loss, I was afraid of it. I was afraid of losing a toy, a bracelet, a friend. But as the world flows around you, as the apathetic people on the streets pass you by, you start to realize that loss is not a big deal. Many things you have never owned, but to progress is to let go of the attachment that is holding you down.

Reminiscence is nice, but as I round the corner to the end of my teenage years, the things I remember most about life so far are my losses. My losses and things I have gained in return. So I never want to stop letting go of things I don’t even know I’m grasping. I wish that I never stop losing.