This was moved from the contemporary poetry section to the blog section because it just didn't make a very good poem. I liked the ideas, though, so thought I'd include it here as a kind of essay.
Every Hello Contains A Goodbye
Me and two of my oldest Counseling Center friends and colleagues at my retirement party.
Every hello contains a goodbye; it is just a matter of time. But each hello can be different from all of the others. Some are unspoken, just a sense of awareness breaking, like greeting the first light of a new day or smelling freshly brewed coffee on a late-rising, looked-forward-to weekend morning.
Some hellos are just friendly greetings to people one knows only noddingly or not at all, with no expectation of anything but a quickly passing encounter where goodbye is implicit in the greeting.
Some are pregnant with anticipation like the hello to someone one wants to become intimate with, perhaps to become their lover. This hello is filled with fear of an early goodbye.
Saying hello to your life partner is a hello where a goodbye is unthinkable, although said often in daily comings and goings when it is uttered merely as a greeting without any long-term thinking involved.
Saying hello to your new baby is an experience filled with joy and amazement and anticipation of a lifetime of bonded feelings, but with an awareness that it is now time to buy life insurance. You know what your child in its innocence can't begin to imagine. There will be many, many times during his or her life that you will have to say goodbye, just as your parents said goodbye to you.
At some point in your life you must say goodbye to your innocence, even though you didn't even remember having said hello to it. You discover that things are not always fair. People lie and cheat, and they are willing to hurt you or let you be hurt. They are more invested in their own wants and needs than yours. Saying this goodbye allows you to say hello to a new phase of your life where you learn to depend on yourself and make your own decisions. You discover your values and you learn who you can trust--and that isn't such a bad thing.
And throughout your life, if you are open to them, you say hello to new opportunities. You find that you are not bound to the past. Many things are worth saying goodbye to and leaving behind even if the future is still uncertain. For how can anything ever be different for you if you are not willing to say hello to what is new to you?
There are those who spend their lives learning to say goodbye to their own senses of self and learning to merge into the whole of existence, saying hello to a different state of being where every moment is greeted as a novel experience where one immerses oneself to the point of there being no IT or Me. That is not for most of us, although it is a worthy pursuit for some. That is a yin/yang phenomenon that encompasses all of the hellos and goodbyes and shrinks them to a single dimension like the period at the end of this sentence...or expands to encompass the whole universe.
The final hello we can only speculate about. It is the moment our lives in this plane of existence ceases and we move on to whatever follows. We all have ideas about what will happen--or what we will hope to happen--or fear will happen, but we don't know what will happen. So as far as we know, that is or final hello. I wonder if it also contains a goodbye.