No Lesson, Only This

A close friend, someone who’s devoted her life to healing and compassion, reached out recently to check on my health. We hadn’t talked in a while, and her message came without any agenda, just genuine care. I walked her through the rather grim territory I’d been navigating. At some point, she asked the question people often ask when illness shows up: Have you found any deeper meaning in this? Some lesson or insight?

I told her the truth. Not yet. Mostly what I felt was anger. Frustration. A quiet, stubborn sadness. If I had to, I could fall back on Camus—life has no inherent meaning, existence is absurd, and whatever meaning we find is something we decide to put there ourselves. That felt honest enough intellectually, but it didn’t quite capture what I was feeling.

Later that same day, something shifted. I got a call from my elder son, who I hadn’t heard from in several months. He was about to go on his winter break from school, leaving for Europe, where he’s about to spend time traveling and living the way you do when you’re young and time feels endless. The call was simple and unguarded and surprisingly tender. It hit me harder than any philosophical answer ever could.

And that’s when the meaning—if you can even call it that—came into focus. Not as some big revelation, just as something simpler, what felt like a platitude.

Life is very short.

We spend so much time searching for grand lessons or redemptive narratives that make suffering worthwhile. But maybe there’s no hidden lesson. Maybe there’s just the fact of impermanence. Bodies break down. Things change. People drift away and sometimes, against all odds, they come back.

What we actually have — what we’re briefly given — is people. People who need our love. Who deserve it not because they’re perfect or because they’ll be around forever, but precisely because they won’t. Because all of this is so fragile.

If anything lasts, it might not be health or certainty or meaning in the way we usually think of it. It might just be what we leave in each other, the ways we showed up, the ways we loved without any guarantees.

Maybe the only permanence we get is the love we manage to give each other before we run out of time.