I have talked about it with friends. I have shared it with students. I have used it in conversations with people trying to understand why certain individuals entered their lives, made an impact, and eventually walked away.
It is a simple idea:
Some people come into our lives for a reason. They arrive with a purpose — to teach us, challenge us, inspire us, or help us become a different version of ourselves.
Some people come for a season. They walk with us during a particular chapter. They become part of our stories, our struggles, our victories, our memories. But when that chapter ends, the paths that once ran together slowly begin to separate.
And some people… we believe they are lifetimes.
The constants.
The ones we imagine will still be there when the noise fades, when the battles are over, when the spotlight is gone.
For the longest time, I thought I understood this concept.
But life has a way of making us revisit lessons we thought we already learned.
Even at this age, after everything I have experienced, after decades of friendships, relationships, collaborations, battles, and journeys with different people, I still find myself having realizations.
And one of the most painful realizations is this:
Sometimes, we are wrong about the roles people play in our lives.
There are people I thought were lifetimes.
People I believed would be part of the story until the final act.
People I thought would still be there beyond the applause, beyond the achievements, beyond the difficult seasons.
But somewhere along the way, I realized that maybe I misunderstood their place in my story.
Maybe they were not lifetimes after all.
Maybe they were reasons.
And that realization is both surprising and painful.
Because when someone has been part of your life for years, when you have shared countless memories, dreams, struggles, and battles with them, it is difficult to accept that their chapter in your story may have already ended.
Especially when you have always been the kind of person who values loyalty. Someone who holds on. Someone who remembers the people who stood beside you during certain seasons of your life.
But perhaps that is also part of growing older — learning that longevity does not always mean permanence.
A person can be in your life for 20 years and still be a reason.
A person can share some of your greatest moments and still only belong to a particular season.
And a person who leaves does not automatically mean the memories were fake or the bond was meaningless.
Theatre taught me something about stories: not every character appears in every act. Some enter early, change the direction of the plot, and leave before the final curtain call.
But without them, the story would not be the same.
Maybe life is like that.
Some people were never meant to stay forever. They were meant to contribute something, to shape something, to awaken something within us.
The difficult part is accepting that we sometimes hold people to the role we wanted them to play, rather than appreciating the role they were actually meant to have.
At this point in my journey, I am learning to stop forcing people into the category of “lifetime” just because I value them deeply.
I am learning that some goodbyes are not endings filled with anger, but endings filled with acceptance.
I am learning that gratitude can exist even with distance.
That love and letting go can exist at the same time.
Reason. Season. Lifetime.
A lesson I have shared with others for years.
Yet a lesson that, once again, life has asked me to experience personally.
And maybe that is the beauty — and the pain — of being human.
No matter how old we get, there are still lessons we only understand when life makes us live them.
