Why Everything We Love Must Eventually Change

Why Everything We Love Must Eventually Change

On loving things we cannot keep the same forever.

hasif 💌

Oct 28, 2026

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I have a complicated relationship with the idea of things changing. I like the beginning of things. The first few conversations with someone, the excitement of finding a new place, the first time something makes sense after weeks of feeling confused about it. I like the feeling of discovering something that fits into my life so naturally that I start wondering how I managed without it. And then, somewhere in the middle of enjoying it, I remember that I have absolutely no control over how long any of it will last. Which is a ridiculous thing to think about while you’re happy, honestly. Imagine having a perfectly good afternoon and ruining it with the knowledge that time exists.

I wish I could enjoy things without mentally preparing for their absence. I wish loving something didn’t automatically make me aware of all the ways I could eventually lose it. Sometimes I catch myself looking at an ordinary moment and feeling sad about it while it’s still happening, as though my brain has decided that enjoying the present requires a little punishment on the side. I’m sitting with someone I love, laughing about something stupid, and some distant part of me is already aware that we won’t always have afternoons like this. Why am I grieving an afternoon that hasn’t even ended? Can I please finish enjoying my life before I start mourning it?

I suppose this is what happens when you become aware of time in a way you weren’t before. As children, we rarely think about the temporary nature of everything. Summer holidays feel endless, friendships seem permanent, and the people who make up our little worlds appear to belong there indefinitely. We assume our favourite things will remain available to us because, for most of our childhood, they do. Then life begins moving people around. Familiar houses acquire different occupants, friendships become occasional birthday wishes, and places that once held entire versions of ourselves become somewhere we happened to live. We simply realise one day that we haven’t thought about something in months, and the realisation feels almost like discovering we’ve misplaced a part of our life.

I find that deeply unfair. We spend so much of our lives becoming attached to things, learning their details, building routines around them, and allowing them to become part of our understanding of who we are. Then time does what time does, and we’re expected to accept that everything has an expiration date we were never given access to. I understand that change is necessary. I understand that people grow apart, bodies age, circumstances shift, and life keeps moving regardless of our personal preferences. Knowing all of this intellectually does absolutely nothing to make the emotional experience easier. Understanding why something happens and being happy that it happened are two entirely different things.

I received a submission from one of my subscribers, Odette, that made me think more deeply about this. Her writing explores the experience of watching roses grow older and begin to fade, and the thoughts that emerge when she considers their eventual departure. What struck me about her reflection was how an ordinary experience with flowers opened up a much bigger question about existence, death, and our relationship with everything we love. I’ll leave her piece here because I want you to experience her thoughts in her own words before I continue with mine.

ODETTE’S ESSAY:

I’ve been very mesmerized by these roses. I’ve been watching them grow before my eyes, and a part of me has been anticipating their death, with the anxiety of what will happen after they’re gone. I’ve enjoyed their company so much.

Through my time with them, I’ve been noticing their skin. How beautiful and detailed they are. And I started noticing them wrinkle. In a way, announcing that their departure will come soon, whenever time has aligned it.

A part of me felt this sadness. And I sat with it for a bit, still watching them. Just in awe of their beauty and how much they’re teaching me.

I’ve been thinking about death deeply lately. Thinking about what meaning society has held onto about death for a while now, and what meaning time has been slowly unfolding. Watching these roses has taken me deeper.

At first, I felt their wrinkling skin as something that was happening to them. Imagining maybe it was something they disliked. And the more I sit with them, the more I am realizing that the wrinkling of their skin is not just something that is happening to them.

It is something they are making happen.

It’s their way of saying, “My soul will be departing soon.” Without setting our conventional timer on themselves.

Their way of saying they have given what they were meant to give in the time we shared, and are starting to get ready to depart on their next journey.

What a beautiful thing it is to have the opportunity to watch another soul live, and then start witnessing the early process of their departure. And to be present enough to still receive all the light they are sharing through their physical form.

Sharing consciousness that will stay with me even after their soul starts its new journey, in whatever form it wishes to take next.

Reminding me that this is exactly what I am also here to do.

To give, and to receive.

Our universe operates on the balance of all things.

Love.

We are receiving and giving.

Our breathing is one of the ways we do this. We take in what is ours, and we give back what is not.

I sit with what I receive. I take it in. I process it through my body, then through my mind. And then I take in the light of it, and release what is not mine.

The light of it is what creates my soul.

Like building a Lego project.

When I decide to take in and not release, the piece never goes where it needs to go. When I inhale and hold it, the information stops moving. And could eventually lead to the death of my body.

Rebirth is what I do when I continue this flow. Every time I take what is mine and release what isn’t.

It is the dance of love.

True happiness arrives after this awakening. Understanding that we are all travelers, trading information from the one consciousness we all share.

The ones who have been successful at this trade are the ones who traveled far. Evolution tells the story of these species.

When one trader overcompensates, they throw off the balance. It’s like exhaling more than inhaling.

When one decides to take more than they give, they throw off the balance. Like inhaling more than exhaling.

Not love.

We are here to witness each other do this. And in doing so, we begin to understand the bigger puzzle that is all of us traders united.

Understanding something deeper about our existence.

How this dance started.

And where it’s going.

Reading Odette’s piece made me think about how often we associate change with loss, even when the two aren’t necessarily the same thing. We see something becoming different and immediately start comparing it to what it used to be, as though its earlier version is the only one that deserves to exist. We do this with ourselves, too. We look at old photographs and miss the person we were, forgetting that we spent a considerable amount of time being that person and desperately wanting to become someone else. We miss old friendships while remembering all the reasons they became difficult, and we romanticise places we couldn’t wait to leave. Memory has a strange way of making the past look like somewhere we should have known how to appreciate better.

I think we have a habit of treating change as evidence that something has gone wrong. A relationship becomes quieter, a friendship loses its daily conversations, or a dream we once cared about stops feeling right, and our first instinct is to search for the moment everything went wrong. We want an explanation that will make the change feel manageable, preferably one that gives us somebody to blame. It’s difficult to accept that some things reach their natural conclusion without anybody being cruel, careless, or at fault. Sometimes two people have loved each other sincerely and still become people who can no longer share a life. Sometimes an experience gives us everything we needed from it, and continuing to hold on becomes an attempt to recover a feeling that belongs to another time.

And honestly, I hate how little control we have over this. I hate that love can make something feel so essential to our lives while giving us absolutely no guarantee that it will remain there. We can show up, make an effort, remember birthdays, have difficult conversations, apologise when we’re wrong, and do everything within our ability to care for something properly. None of that gives us ownership over its future. Other people have their own lives unfolding inside them, just as we do, and those lives will keep changing in directions we cannot predict or negotiate. I don’t think this makes loving someone pointless. I think it makes the whole experience much more frightening than we usually admit.

Perhaps this is why I struggle with endings even when I know they are necessary. I want a neat distinction between things worth keeping and things worth releasing, as though life is going to provide a clear explanation before asking me to move forward. Instead, I’m left with memories that are both beautiful and painful, with people I still care about despite having no place in their present lives, and with older versions of myself whom I can barely recognise anymore. I don’t want to pretend that every ending arrives with a lesson or that every loss eventually reveals itself as a blessing. Some things hurt, some things leave a gap, and some changes take years to make sense of. We don’t have to turn every difficult experience into evidence that everything happened for a reason.

Still, I wonder whether part of loving something is accepting that our relationship with it will never remain exactly as it began. Love itself changes. The way we care for our parents changes as we grow older, friendships develop new rhythms, and even our relationship with a place becomes different after we’ve lived there for years. We cannot preserve every feeling in its original form, and I don’t think trying to do so would leave us with much room to live. The past deserves to exist without being forced to repeat itself, and the present deserves our attention without having to prove that it will last forever.

I am still learning how to sit with that thought without turning it into another reason to be sad. I want to enjoy the people in my life without secretly preparing myself for their absence, and I want to let things become different without immediately deciding that I’ve lost something irreplaceable. I know there will be days when I fail at this spectacularly, when an old song makes me miss somebody I haven’t spoken to in years, or when I find a photograph and spend an unreasonable amount of time wondering where that version of my life went. I will probably continue to grieve things while they’re happening, because apparently my mind has decided that peace and unnecessary emotional preparation should coexist.

Perhaps growing older means learning that love and permanence are separate things, even though we’ve spent years hoping they would arrive together. Something can matter enormously without remaining yours forever, and its eventual absence cannot retroactively make the experience meaningless. I don’t have a satisfying conclusion to this, and I don’t want to manufacture one just to make the ending easier to read. I only know that I would rather have loved the things that changed than become so afraid of losing them that I never let them matter in the first place.

Co-Author Substack ID:

Odette Tisseglo

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