I once imagined what it would be like to near the end of my life. (This is very in-character for me.) What would be on my mind? When I thought about what lies ahead and everything that has passed, what would I see? What would I like to see? One of the things I’ve imagined I’d like to see—which is a complete fiction, mind you—is a reunion of sorts. It would be incredible, I think, to see once more the people whose lives have touched your own. These are the people whose paths may have crossed for a while, but which ultimately went their separate ways; and as they did, they would have become entirely different people. If they were to meet again so many years later, would they even recognise each other? The odd thing is that I believe they would, although it might be rather like meeting someone new—let’s call them a familiar stranger—and I believe the encounter would be all the more moving because they would both know that, despite the currents of life, they had somehow made it to the final act together. Two individuals whose paths had crossed would cross once more, only this time in commemoration of the lives they have led rather than in anticipation of the lives they might lead.

This is, of course, a thought experiment. This doesn’t usually happen. In fact, the idea is so other-worldly that I might even liken the idea to Heaven. But in this world, people frequently drop in and out of each other’s lives, and there are people alive today who, if you stop to think about it, might not be around as long as you are. I will confess that I’ve thought about this with my parents: they have been a constant in my life since its beginning, but there will come a day when I no longer can see them, after which I’ll go on and become a person they will never know. That chapter will have ended, and it’s sad to think about—impermanence. How fleeting everything is! Everything and everyone passes away eventually. Even the planet we’re now living on will at some point come to dust. After all, the Earth is just a giant rock hurtling through space, orbiting a star that will, too, come to perish.

There is a very old Buddhist metaphor that expresses this idea quite beautifully:

Picture a wave. In the ocean. You can see it, measure it, its height, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through. And it’s there. And you can see it, you know what it is. It’s a wave.

And then it crashes in the shore and it’s gone. But the water is still there. The wave was just a different way for the water to be, for a little while. You know it’s one conception of death for Buddhists: the wave returns to the ocean, where it came from and where it’s supposed to be.

Chidi in The Good Place

Life, then, is a wave, and “the wave returns to the ocean;” but it is a beautiful wave while it lasts all the same, regardless of how many things are left unsaid or undone. And indeed, the fact that we should have such regrets and shed a tear over such things—however impermanent they may be—betrays a touch of beauty as well. The wave crashes on one shore, for we all have only one final destination in this lifetime, but the wave was far more than that. It had its own journey and conditions that brought it there, but which might have brought it anywhere else. There are a multitude of paths the wave might have gone to end up on that beach, or to arrive at any other, if the currents had carried it right; and indeed, the wave was more than even the journey it took. Its beauty is measured not simply by its path or its destination, but also its possibilities—not simply what was but all that could’ve been.

Perhaps these words make my point better than any of my own could:

Of all the places I could be, I just want to be here with you.

Evelyn to Joy in Everything, Everywhere, All at Once