Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

God's hand will over you' and even - underneath, hidden, but it is there, incorrigible - 'I will be with you I will watch you - always.' It is a mother's good-by. 'You must not go - I cannot bear to have you go! But you shall not go alone, unwatched. They try to bridge the distance, almost to deny it. While Good-by ('God be with you') and Adios say too much. But it passes over the significance of the moment of parting it says nothing. It is - 'Go out in the world and do well, my son.' It is encouragement and admonition. It does not evade the issue like the sturdy blinking Farewell. Unlike the Auf Wiedershens and Au revoirs, it does not try to cheat itself by any bravado 'Till we meet again,' any sedative to postpone the pain of separation. “For Sayonara, literally translated, 'Since it must be so,' of all the good-bys I have heard is the most beautiful. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits - islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.” Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. “When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment.

Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh