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“In order to gain something, you have to lose something,” she always said. People are always trying to get something for nothing. But that’s just theft. If you’ve gained something, it means that someone, somewhere, has lost something. Even happiness is built on someone else’s misfortune. She often reminded me of this. In fact, she considered it one of the laws of the universe.
When human beings invented the mobile phone, they also invented the anxiety that comes with not having one on you.
I guess it’s the same with life. We all know it has to end someday, but even so, we act as if we’re going to live forever. Like love, life is beautiful because it must come to an end.
I couldn’t help but think of all the movies I hadn’t seen, all the meals I hadn’t eaten, and all the music I’d never hear. It’s the future you’ll never get to see that you really regret missing most of all when you die.
What did I gain by growing up, and what did I lose? I know the answer to only the second part of that question. Innocence—all those precious hopes and dreams that you can only have when you’re in your adolescence.
“You only realize what the really important things are once you’ve lost them.” That’s what my mother would say at the end
I was so depressed at the time that I agreed to it without really thinking.
Before clocks were invented, it was only humans who had a sense of time.”
With freedom comes uncertainty, insecurity, and anxiety. Human beings exchanged their freedom for the sense of security that comes from living by set rules and routines—despite knowing that they pay the cost of these rules and regulations with their freedom.
Every moment has its own name,
“Cats and humans have been partners for over ten thousand years. One thing you realize when you’ve lived with a cat for a long time is that you may think that you own them, but that’s not really the way it is. Cats simply allow us the pleasure of their company.”
human being can never really grieve their own death. Death is always something that happens to other people around them.
“Yeah, but just being alive doesn’t mean all that much on its own. How you live is more important.”
Humans tend to regret the life they never lived and the choices they
“They say in the end you become aware of who the most important people are in your life and that you finally understand the value of lots of other important, irreplaceable things and how wonderful life truly is. You traveled around the world you live in and saw it with fresh eyes. You discovered that despite the boredom and the everyday routines of life that there is a real beauty in it. That on its own makes my having come here worth it.” “But I’m going to die soon.”
Even in death humans have found a way to reproduce the same inequalities that we have to deal while we’re alive.
What would the differences be between the world in which I existed (however briefly) and a different world where almost everything is exactly the same, except in this parallel universe I never existed? It is all those differences, however minuscule, that make up my existence.
Dad, all these years I’ve wanted to see you, to say I’m sorry. To say thank you, and good-bye.
