In This Way...

A love letter to those who know it's for them

I found it hard to write this for some time. I felt like I needed to find the most artful and eloquent words to describe something so momentous, so large in feeling and meaning. But today, I am reading through my words, and I feel that they are enough.

Instead of trying to methodically create this, I let myself just write about my thoughts, and something came together. Somewhere in between prose and poetry perhaps. Not everything has to be perfect, or feel complete—maybe the incomplete is more real. I don’t really know what I’ve written, but I know it’s true.

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There’s a kind of feeling that’s been simmering for a while now, as we near the culmination of this chapter. Anxiety, excitement, nervousness, uncertainty…

It’s thrilling, in a way, like the moment before stepping out on to the stage. The in between part when the house lights dim, the audience goes silent, and the stage manager waits for the cue to open the curtain. The transition from one world to another.

This moment is always my favourite. There’s something so sacred about that decisive second when the whole collective of the theatre embarks on this journey, a journey that they’ve chosen to be a part of. Whether it’s as a viewer, a performer, a stagehand, once the performance starts we agree: to not look back and go forward. In this way, a transition in life is like the start of a performance.

As always in a performance, characters enter and characters exit, storylines develop and resolve. Sometimes there are intermissions—necessary pauses before the next act. In this way, each chapter of life is like a scene in a performance. People appear and disappear, sometimes reappearing, as our stories unfold before us.

Life is a constant passing from chapter to chapter, and as time dictates, once the page is turned there is no flipping it back over. Once you have read something, you cannot read it for the first time again. But you can return to it endlessly, and remember the feeling it gave you to see those words for the first time. And if it’s something written with special care, returning to it will continue to remain timeless. In this way, our memories are like passages of a book. Impossible to relive like the first time—but possible to reread and reflect upon.

A book is a tangible object, and destroyable. But its knowledge and impression are everlasting. Even if the book is gone, its essence lives on within its reader, and from reader to reader it lives too. In this way, people are like books. We pass on something to each other, our lives lessons lived. No matter if you cannot hold the original text in your hands, its lessons remain with you. And if you’re lucky, you will encounter the original copy many more times in your life.

You all have a place on my shelf.

Love,

Simon

Adelaide Labille-Guiard