Every sweet stage of life has to end.
The bitter stages end too, mercifully. But the mercy of an end to those doesn’t seem sufficient compensation for the nostalgic pangs of the end of the sweet.
I suppose the quintessential human struggle is dealing with goodbye – dealing with the many deaths that entered through the fall.
Every advance on the journey starts on the death of one past.
I suppose the idea of paradise – a restoration, resurrection, and return to the previous selves who’ve died – is the only resolution. Perhaps all our pasts get to continue and exist in fulfilled form, concurrent with all the others. All we ever were, at once.