Ever get those moments when something simple suddenly clicks?

I am reading this book about poetry, and they put a couple lines of a W.B. Yeats Poem called "When You Are Old." Just two simple lines in the classic iambic pentameter:

When you are old and grey and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book

Well, somehow for some reason these two lines gave me a shift in perspective. It hit home. I thought about my parents, and my family, and my friends....people who are so close to me, something we can all relate to, right? People who we feel will always be there. But really, we are not inseparable. All of our relationships are transitory, in transit. In the middle of a coffeehouse in Bermondsey, London, I just started to cry. Something clicked. Something basic. That essential aloneness that paradoxically we all must experience together.

Your family is your family for now, your friends, acquaintances, but really we do not own these relationships. They are part of us only temporarily. All things must pass. Dare I say, they are an illusion? But an illusion on only a material level. Perhaps after we die, our spirits are absolved into everyone else's across the universe. And at that point we are all family, friends, acquaintances, just on a different level. (And part of me believes that this same universal relationship exists during life, but on a level apart from what the conscious mind can comprehend).

Of course we have no idea what lies on the other side of it all. But as for what we do know, as far as we can tell, all we can do is take all of our passing relationships in stride. Really LOVE people we have in our lives. Love life. It's so unbelievably short and beautiful. I know it's basic, but how often do we stop to think about this? How often do we get hung up on the silliest of things? If nothing lies beyond life here, then for this moment we are just bursts of energy, color, life, a rare occurrence, just shooting stars flying across the sky, and who knows if we will ever happen again? I feel so unbelievably grateful and blessed to be alive. The power of poetry, all that from two simple lines...
Two more quotes which further illustrate this feeling:

"Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again."
— Hermann Hesse

"All things transitory are but an allegory" ~wish I could remember who said that...