The story behind this song is extraordinary. Roy Orbison, one of the Traveling Wilburys, died before the music video was filmed. Rather than awkwardly working around his absence or replacing him, George and the others pointed the camera at Roy's empty rocking chair, still sitting in the frame where he would have been. The chair kept moving. The music played on. It was one of the most moving tributes in rock history: an acknowledgment that endings are part of the journey.
Honoring what has passed without clinging to it is perhaps the most mature relationship a person can have with time. George spent the second half of his life steeped in Eastern philosophy that had, at its center, an honest reckoning with impermanence. Everything that arises, passes.
Every chapter of your life has a last page, even if you cannot see it from where you are standing. The job you are in, the season of life you are navigating, the relationships you are building, all of it will eventually complete itself and make way for something else. The gentle reminder that “the best you can do is forgive” makes more sense when we consider how fragile life is.
Each remaining mile deserves your full attention. The Beatles themselves were on a journey that ended. The music did not. What they made together outlasted the band that made it, which is as good a definition of a life well lived as any. When you know a chapter is closing, you pay attention differently.
Noting life’s impermanence does not require you to love the present any less. In fact, the honest acknowledgment that this moment will pass is often what finally allows you to be fully present for it. Accepting the end of the line is the deepest form of appreciation and maturity.
Death of a loved one is the “end of the line” for their physical presence, but in many ways it is not the end. A loved one lives on in their loved ones and in our memories. And for many, physical death is only a transition to a better place. So we end May with an invitation to honor every remaining mile of the journey you are on, knowing that the end of one line is always, somehow, the beginning of another.
Today, I will choose to fully appreciate one part of my current season of life, honoring it with genuine presence rather than taking it for granted until it is gone.
What part of your current journey have you been moving through too quickly to fully appreciate? How could accepting the temporary nature of this season actually deepen your experience of it?
