the loveliness of letting go
via maria popova tweet [https://x.com/themarginalian/status/2091128751962702086?s=46]:
The loveliness of letting go – an illustrated ode to life’s lasts
notes/quotes from her linked post [https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/21/odds-and-ends-maija-hurme/]:
The great cruelty of life, and also its great mercy, is that only hindsight ever knows each last — the last time your lover put their hand on the small of your back, the last sip of the last cup at your favorite coffee shop before it vanished overnight, the last living note of your mother’s voice. Bittersweet or downright devastating, lasts are the currency of loss with which we pay the price for loving. They are the necessary losses that make us who we are, our training ground for mastering the art of losing by which we apprentice ourselves to love.
Great children’s books are works of philosophy in disguise — philosophy being, in Montaigne’s perfect definition, the art of learning to die, which is of course the key to learning to live, just as learning to lose is the key to learning to love. Odds and Ends by Finnish author and artist Maija Hurme is one such book — a tender illustrated catalogue of losses, from the everyday to the existential, that is at bottom a love letter to what we have, to the bittersweet knowledge that we have none of it for the keeping, calling to mind poet Lisel Mueller’s poignant line: *“What exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious.”
Page after page we come to feel that we are rehearsing for the final act, the “very last last” that awaits every living thing.
Everything ends with a last:
the very last thought,
the very last breath,
the very last heartbeat.
And the very last goodbyes.Pulsating beneath it all is an invitation to practice the art of letting go, which, paradoxically, is what allows us to go on living.
cling\ness.. et al
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soul mate ness et al
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be you. 