As the years slowly pass and I continue to grow older, each new calendar hung on my wall in January feels a little emptier than the previous. It is not that my days have become more uneventful (life in fact grows everbusier) but that a certain essence of emptiness deepens. Now, with this month half spent, each day has held the absence of that feeling which once imbued the New Year with a curiosity, turning the simple routines of the old age into a kind of newfound sense of determination. Instead, I find myself halfway through the film last year has left behind, and I can not bring myself to finish it. To do so would feel like another farewell, and I am not very fond of those. Yet, I have recently been reminded, in small subtle ways, that we are only prepared for life’s greater, seismic goodbyes through a lifetime of these tiny ones.

This morning, as usual, I woke up at the sunrise hour. I watched the steam from my teacup vanish into the morning air. I felt the cat leap from my lap and the sudden coldness where her warmth had been. Outside the window, the last of the darkness was retreating over the pine line, and the mist that flutters over the road was in the act of relinquishing its ghostform for the day. The night insects had silenced their song, and were slowly replaced by the sound of footsteps of people on their way towards the bus service. These events are not separate. The cooling teacup and the evaporating mist are part of the same liturgy. They are the day’s first teachings of release. We practise them unaware, like tiny rehearsals for a greater letting go.

In my life, different inspirations have come and gone. The Harper Lee book that once sat in my bedside table now rests atop a dusty bookshelf. The paintings that once rearranged my vision have become a habitual sight in my walls. Each arrival changed me and each departure left a new shape behind. With age, the welcoming of an inspiration has felt like the admission of a visitor who immediately begins to rearrange the furniture. When they inevitably leave, I am left in a room that is simultaneously familiar and altered, and I must again forthsend the person I was before they entered. My heart is like a corridor with opening and closing doors.

My body, too, is a space of perpetual leavetaking. Sometimes, for no reason, the memory of a childhood verandah will surface. Not the visual image of it, but the feeling of splintered wood on my feet or the smell of rainsoaked primroses from a garden long gone. It is there, sudden and overwhelming, and then it is not. It is like a guest who will not stay for tea. Or I will catch, on a passing breeze, the soft scent of pine that my father’s hands carried in from the woods. It arrives, this tiny world contained in an inhalation, and is gone again before the breath is spent. These goodbyes are inscribed in my essence, much like a silent molting of the sensory bygone.

The seasons are the masters of this lingering farewell. In autumn, a single brave leaf will turn a beautiful aureate colour while the others remain their usual green. And for days it will tremble on the branch before it ultimately lets go. In the haste of life I often miss these goodbyes, although they are so patient. Maybe that is why I am at risk of assuming that loss is always an event, when it often is a slow pageturning. And, yes, the last time I felt this particular thrill at the sight of a calendar’s empty dates was in my final undergraduate year, when every morning felt like spring and everything seemed poised for change. Perhaps, then, it is no accident that in my mind the turning of seasons and the pulse of human purpose has always been entwined.

But I look at the greater wildernesses of the world, the falcon's shadow sweeping across the field and then withdrawning into the woods. The cliff face, grain by grain, giving itself to the beach below. This earth is in a constant process of self-emptying, a pouring out that is also a making. There is, in the calmest corner of my conscience, a recognition of something ethereal in this pattern. There are some experiences in which to give oneself away does not mean to vanish, but to become part of something new and different. Our attention is the vessel for this transubstantiation of presence into memory, of stone into sand, and of moments into stories.

Birdsong does not end with a period but with a fading, as if the sound is slowly being taken back into the natural silence of the world. And I do believe that to be made of a thousand little goodbyes is to make yourself fragile. To be a vessel of dried clay, ringed with the fine cracks of every departure. Therefore, this fragility is also a permanent condition. Grief is the remainder of longing like sadness is the residue of love, and they both remain with you. They are the chill that rises from the marsh after the sun has gone, what is left in the absence of light. We carry them with us and feel them grow with every January simply because it is what we are made of.