A Chapter Closes, Another Begins
A small knee injury brought training to an early end today, which turned out to be exactly the gift the day needed — freeing up the time to say a proper farewell to a friend.
Bap has been at the school for three months. We were never what you would call close in the conventional sense, but living in each other's pockets the way you do in a place like this, we shared a good number of happy moments together. These tended to involve something to eat, something to drink, and occasionally — as last night confirmed — a little too much to drink.
But last night felt right. Like the appropriate send-off for someone you may genuinely never see again. That thought carries a familiar weight — a small sadness that arrives at these moments without being invited and leaves without being asked to. I have come to accept it as part of the texture of this life. Slowly, over the years and the goodbyes, I have learned that this particular cycle — where loss feels ever present, where people arrive and depart with a regularity that would once have felt destabilising — is as rich as any other phase of living. Perhaps richer, for what it asks you to hold.
What I find beautiful is the rhythm of it. As things end, others begin. A chapter closes. Another opens. There is something natural in that, something that feels less like loss and more like the way things are supposed to move — always forward, always changing, always making room.
Goodbyes make me reflective in the best possible way. They have a strange gift inside them — the ability to bring forward the best of the person leaving, to see them clearly and warmly, without the clutter of the everyday. I am glad I can experience that without attaching too hard to what is passing.
The people who come through this school arrive from everywhere. Each carries a story — happy, sad, complicated, unfinished, somewhere in between. All of them unique. All of them united, beneath their differences, the same quiet decision: to improve. To show up, day after day, and take one more step in the direction of something they believe in.
I respect every one of those decisions. I feel something close to pride that we are all here, chasing our separate dreams together.
That, in the end, is what this place is.