The Endings You Don’t See Coming (Until They’re Gone) | Jonathan Fields

Somewhere in the past few years, you did something you love, with someone you love, for the very last time. And you had no idea when it happened. This solo episode is about why we cruise through our most meaningful endings, and why that might actually be the best possible news about how you've been living. In this deep-dive solo, Jonathan Fields unpacks an idea he calls unmarked lasts, the everyday endings that slip past without ceremony, starting with a story about fifteen years of chairlifts with his daughter and the ordinary Sunday that unceremoniously closed an era. It's a conversation built for anyone in their 40s, 50s, or beyond who has started to notice that the archive of things that ended is getting fuller, and wonders if they should have been paying better attention. In this episode, you'll explore: Why the baby book has a page for every first and not a single page for the lasts, and what that asymmetry does to usThe structural reason you cannot catch a casual last while it's happening, no matter how present or grateful you becomeWhat researcher Hal Hershfield discovered when he asked people to imagine a meaningful place for the very last time, and the surprising thing that didn't happen to their happinessThe centuries-old Portuguese word for the ache you've probably never been able to nameTwo kinds of lasts, and the completely different thing each one asks of you The endings you can't remember may be the strongest evidence of a life you were fully inside of. Episode Transcript https://www.goodlifeproject.com/podcast/anticipatory-grief-saudade-meaning-midlife-nostalgia Next week, guest host Cynthia Morris is sitting down with Susan Bratton to talk about why desire in midlife doesn't fade so much as it gets misread, and what actually rekindles it at any age. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss that or any upcoming episodes! Check out our sponsors and resources: Visit Our Sponsor Page https://www.goodlifeproject.com/sponsors/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jonathan Fields?

  So somewhere in the last few years, safe bet, you did something or were with someone that you love for the very last time. And you didn't even notice or remember. And the not noticing, that's the part I find genuinely astonishing. So if you're somewhere in your 30s, 40s, 50s, or beyond, you have started, maybe without quite admitting it, to notice that things end, not in dramatic headline ways, but in small ways. You'll reach for an experience that you assumed was just always going to be there, or a person, or a phase, or a particular feeling, and discover that it slipped out the back door at some point and didn't even say goodbye. And today, I want to talk about the things that we do for the last time without knowing it,

• 0:45Jonathan Fields?

  why we miss them, why we're built to miss them, and what becomes available when we stop treating that as a failure and actually start seeing it as something closer to evidence of a life well-lived. I'm going to tell you a story about a chairlift, thousands of miles traveled, and too many feet of snow to count. We're going to walk through a few rooms together that I suspect you just might recognize. Rooms that look different to each of us, but that you and I share. And by the end, I want to hand you a way of of holding all of it that I found does the opposite of what you'd expect, which is that it makes the whole thing, the unplanned, the unnoticed final moments

• 1:28Jonathan Fields?

  and experiences lighter, more poignant, more meaningful. So excited to share this deep dive solo episode with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. And I'll start where it all began for me, right after this short break.

• 1:49Speaker 01

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• 2:53Jonathan Fields?

  This episode is brought to you by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, hosted by Katie Milkman, an award-winning behavioral scientist and author of the bestselling book, How to Change. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Hear true stories from Nobel laureates, authors, athletes, and everyday people about why we do the things we do. Listen to Choiceology at schwab.com/podcast or wherever you listen. So my daughter and I started snowboarding together when she was maybe nine years old. And from that winter on, for the next 15 years or so, it was me and her on the mountain. I was her partner in adventure and snow.

• 3:37Jonathan Fields?

  Not one of her partners, her one partner. The two of us just kind of always rode together, side by side, on mountains around the world. It was was just the shape that things took, in part because no one else she knew snowboarding, and in part because I'd loved riding deep out of my whole adult life. And by some stroke of luck, snowboarding became her driving passion, too. And the particular sound of of boots stepping into bindings, helmets clicking on goggles easing down, the wordless negotiation about which run and eventually which steep woods to navigate, the way that you can ride next to someone for hours and barely speak

• 4:20Jonathan Fields?

  and have it be one of the closest conversations of your life. Snowboarding became a language between the two of us, a language with almost no actual words in it, which, if you have a kid, you will understand is an extraordinary gift. And we we went everywhere with it. We rode local little mountains in the Berkshires. We we headed out west to Steamboat in Breck until we knew them in our bodies. And we rode Whistler and Banff in in Canada and Zermatt in Switzerland with the giant Matterhorn just standing there being absurd about itself in the background. And we developed this kind of slightly ridiculous habit of closing mountains down,

• 5:04Jonathan Fields?

  catching the very last lift of the day, you know, riding it up into that light that you only get in the last hour, where the sun comes in sideways and it throws everybody's shadows 40 feet long across the snow. And then surfing down through all of it together, the two of us, often among the last two people in some of the most majestic landscapes on the planet, while they were already starting to shut the lifts and trails behind us. And I could do that with her for the rest of my life, I figured. Why wouldn't I? It was just just what we did. And then she graduated college. And she moved to this incredible little ski town, deep in the mountains, in a box canyon. It was supposed to be a season.

• 5:49Jonathan Fields?

  It turned into about a year and a half of her chasing the things that she loved in the place that is built for loving it. She was in heaven, sneaking in runs nearly every day with a whole new group of friends that had become, for that moment, like chosen family. And I want to be clear, I was genuinely uncomplicatedly thrilled for her. I still am, 100%. This is exactly what you want for your kid. I mean, you raise someone to have a passion fierce enough that they'll organize their life around it and find a crew to share it with. And then they do, and it works. It's it's a success. I mean, it's amazing. I love that she has this.

• 6:35Jonathan Fields?

  And at the same time, somewhere in there, you know, standing in my kitchen in Colorado, where she was seven hours away and just living this incredible life, I had this this thought land, kind of on me sideways, the way the true ones tend to do. She has a whole new crew now. She has a whole community of people out there who love this thing the way that she loves it, who can ride with her in a way that I honestly can barely even keep up with anymore, who are her age and and her speed and her future. And she's out there right now, doing the thing that we did, without me. Not that we'd never do it again. Of course, we would, and we have, and we will.

• 7:20Jonathan Fields?

  But it was an end to it being just our thing, to me being the only one she'd ride into the sunset with. And and here's the part that I actually want to tell you about. It wasn't sad. I mean, exactly. Or it wasn't only sad. Underneath the thrill and tangled up with it was this other thing that I didn't have a clean word for. Because I think what I understood in that kitchen was that the particular thing that we had, you know, me and her as the the one and only, the two of us as the whole story, that was already over, not ending.

• 8:05Jonathan Fields?

  I mean, over, past tense. It had happened, you know, sometime in the previous year or two, on some specific day, on, you know, some specific mountain. And we had ridden our last lift of that whole era of our lives together. I was now a part of a bigger mix, which, again, I love for her in every way, while realizing at the same time. There'd been a shift, a kind of a passing of the just us baton. And I could not tell you when it was. I've searched for it. I've tried to kind of find a day. And I can't because the day it happened, it didn't look like anything.

• 8:46Jonathan Fields?

  It looked like a random Sunday. It looked like, you know, every other day we rode, we surfed down through the long shadows, we drove home. And one of those completely ordinary days was the last one of its kind. And neither of us, neither of us had any idea. There was no final run, no ceremony, no, no moment where I knew to turn to her on the lift and say, hold on, pay attention. This is the last time it's ever going to be just us like this. You know, where we're the only ones who share this language together. It just kind of quietly became something only we did. And, and it turned into something where others were invited into the experience.

• 9:31Jonathan Fields?

  And I told you, the riddle at the top wasn't really a riddle. This is what I meant. I did the thing I love most with someone I love deeply for the last time in that form. And I missed it completely. And I've come to believe that I missed it for a reason that's actually kind of beautiful, even though it didn't feel beautiful in that moment where I realized it in the kitchen. But we have a long way to go before I've sort of earned the right to say that. So let me back up a little bit and ask the obvious question first, which is, how does this keep happening to us? How are we, how are we this bad at noticing?

• 10:14Jonathan Fields?

  And is that actually a bad thing or an incredible thing? So there's something kind of genuinely strange about how we're built. And once you see it, you can't unsee it. We're obsessed with firsts. We have this entire apparatus for them. I mean, think about it, you know, the baby book. There's a page for the first tooth, a page for the first word, a page for the first step, the first haircut, the first day of school. We photograph the first, we date them. We call the grandparents about them. A first is an event. It gets marked.

• 10:52Jonathan Fields?

  And, and we have rituals and practices and moments to note the big, clearly defined ends also. And as my recent conversation with Bruce Feiler shared, we're creating these new rituals all the time. But, but show me the page in the baby book for the last time you carried them, or the last time they fell asleep on your chest, or the last time they reached up to be picked up instead of you having to ask. There's no page for that. There's no page for any of it. Nobody has ever in the history of baby books included a page that says, last time, something so simple, you barely noticed it happened, even though it was something that defined you, or a relationship, or an entire season

• 11:33Jonathan Fields?

  of life even. And the reason isn't that those moments matter less. I mean, by any honest measure, they matter just as much, maybe more. The reason is that we can't fill the page in because we don't know. And that's the whole asymmetry right there. A first, it kind of announces itself. It has to. It's the first one. There's never been another. It's singular by definition. So, you know, it arrives wearing a little sign that says, hey, this is new. You can't miss it. The big last is often similarly apparent, the passing or the death, the end

• 12:11Jonathan Fields?

  of a job or of a relationship. But, but a subtle kind of everyday last, it tends to wear no sign at all. It's disguised as just another ordinary instance of a thing that's happened so many times and that you fully expect to happen many more times. Then the last time you carried your kid up the stairs felt exactly like the 400 times just before it. And that's the trap. Not that you weren't paying attention. You were paying plenty of attention. It's that there was nothing to pay attention to. The moment gave you no signal because the whole nature of an everyday last is that

• 12:56Jonathan Fields?

  it cannot be identified from the inside in the moment. It can only ever be recognized later in the rear view. Once enough time has kind of gone by that you realize the thing simply stopped happening. So we walk through our lives, photographing every first and big finish, and then sleeping straight through every other subtle last. And then one day, usually somewhere later in life, maybe in the middle years of life, we look back and notice the gap. We notice this, this whole shadow archive of endings that we never recorded because we never knew they were endings. And it can feel, when you first notice it, like a kind

• 13:41Jonathan Fields?

  of, almost like negligence, like you should have been more present, like a more awake person, you know, they would have caught these moments. So I want to gently push back on that hard by the end of this. But first, I want to make it worse because I think you have to feel the full weight before the relief means anything. So I want to walk you through a few rooms. I'm not going to tell you which one is yours. You'll know. And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Good Life Project is sponsored by FAIRE. So you know the feeling when you wander into a little shop that you've never been in and within about 30 seconds, you can just tell

• 14:26Jonathan Fields?

  somebody actually cares. Every candle, every notebook, every odd little thing on the shelf was chosen by a real human with a point of view and taste that you just love. It's less a store and more of a person, and it's a big part of what makes a place feel like home. That's why I love what FAIRE is doing. So FAIRE is a wholesale marketplace connecting independent retailers with over 100,000 unique brands worldwide across home, apparel, beauty, food, and more. It's the thoughtful distinctive stuff that makes a shop stand out and keeps regulars coming back, which matters as you plan for the holidays. Eligible retailers get 60-day interest-free payment terms plus free returns on first orders with every brand. So trying something new doesn't feel like a gamble.

• 15:11Jonathan Fields?

  So sign up today and get 50% off your first wholesale order, up to $100, at F A I R E dot com slash good life. That's F A I R E dot com slash good life. Terms may apply. Good Life Project is sponsored by Ernesta Rugs. So if you ever had a space that was almost right, not wrong, just close enough, for me, that's our front porch. It's where I go to think and have my coffee. But every rug we put out there has been whatever size was available. So it just kind of floats. And I kept putting off fixing it because getting the right size felt like a whole project. Then I found Ernesta. They make designer quality rugs, custom cut to the exact size of your space.

• 15:54Jonathan Fields?

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• 16:27Speaker 01

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• 17:01Jonathan Fields?

  There's the last time that maybe your whole group was in one place together. You know, your real friends, the ones from that era when your friendships were the center of your life before geography and careers and partners and kids just scattered everybody to a million different time zones. There was a specific night when you were all in the same room and it was loud and it was somebody telling the story that everyone had like heard a million times before. And you were probably a little annoyed about something small. And, you know, like the way that you are when you assume that there's just infinite more of this coming. And there hasn't been. That was the last one with everybody. You've seen most of them since, sure, you know,

• 17:44Jonathan Fields?

  like in twos and threes, but the whole thing, all of you in one room, breathing the same air, that already happened for the last time. And on the night it did, it just looked like a party. It looked like any other night. So that's one room of these everyday unmarked last, right? Then there's a last ordinary Thursday before the phone call, before the diagnosis, before the test result, before the call or conversation, the thing that split your life into before and after. And what people who've lived through these moments will often tell you, almost always, is that they'd quote, give anything to go back.

• 18:26Jonathan Fields?

  Not to the big dramatic moments, but to the completely unremarkable afternoon from the before. A boring errand, a dinner where nothing happened, because the last normal day didn't know it was the last normal day. It spent itself on traffic and a grocery list. And you give the world to have it back exactly as seemingly unobserved, unnoticed, wasted as it was. Then there's another room. There's the last time parent picked you up instead of you picking them up. Somewhere in time, the whole thing just reversed. There was the

• 19:09Jonathan Fields?

  last time that your parent carried something heavy so that you didn't have to. The last time your mom knew something that you didn't and you went to her for the answer instead of the other way around. The handoff happened gradually over years so smoothly that there was never a single day that you could point to and say, there, that's where it flipped. But it did. It flipped. And you were in the room for every step of it and you never saw the moment it happened. And then there's this other room where it's the last time that maybe your kid climbed into bed in the middle of the night because the world felt too big and not because anything was actually wrong, just because you were the safest place

• 19:51Jonathan Fields?

  they knew. Like, one night was the last night that happened. And the morning after the last time, you had no idea. You'd just done it for the last time. You probably even complained a little bit about not sleeping well, being grumpy. And then there's a last real conversation with someone that you've maybe since drifted away from. Not a fight. There's not like a big rupture, just kind of a friendship that ended out so slowly that you couldn't even feel it happening, kind of like a tide just slowly going out. There was a last time the two of you really talked, like actually talked, the kind where you forget that time

• 20:32Jonathan Fields?

  even exists. And you both walked away from it, assuming the way you always had, that you know, there'd be another one whenever you got around to it. It just kind of never got around to it. That was it. That was the last one. And it was an ordinary day, too. And I want to point something out about every single one of those scenarios, those rooms that we've just walked through. In not one of them, did anyone do anything wrong. There is no villain here. There's no neglect. There's no moment where if you'd just been a better,

• 21:12Jonathan Fields?

  a more attentive person, you'd have caught it. In every one of those rooms, the only thing that happened is that you were living your life at the normal speed of a life being lived, assuming reasonably, the way we all do, that the supply of those moments was endless. And the supply, turns out, it was not endless. It never is. And there's a word for the feeling that's probably sitting in your chest right now, having walked through those rooms. We don't actually have it in English. I've tried to find it, which I think is part of why we tend to be so clumsy with the whole experience. But there is this word

• 21:54Jonathan Fields?

  that I found in Portuguese. And I'm going to completely pronounce this wrong. I've actually looked up how to pronounce it so many times. And depending on whether it's Brazilian Portuguese, or Uruguayan Portuguese, or the dialect, or the area, everyone pronounces it totally differently. The word is sadade. And I'll come back to it. So, hold on to that for now, because we're going to drop back into that. Right? I'm curious about another question here, though, before we do drop into that, because a lot of times, these experiences, these awakenings, these reckonings or realizations, they tend to land somewhere in the middle season of life. So, why does the whole thing tend to really

• 22:34Jonathan Fields?

  hit in midlife? Because it really often does. You don't spend a lot of time in your teens or in your twenties, really contemplating unmarked lasts. And I don't think the reason is just that, well, you know, you've accumulated more of them, though you have, once you're a little bit later in life. I think there's something more specific going on. I think when you're younger, the math of your life runs more or less in one direction. Almost everything is still much closer to a first than a last. First apartment, the first real Java, first time you fall in love, the first time your heart is genuinely broken. And the lasts, big and small, they're mostly still kind of theoretical, way out past the

• 23:18Jonathan Fields?

  horizon, kind of somebody else's problem, future use problem. So, you don't actually have the data set yet. You haven't lived long enough to have a real archive of things that ended, especially everyday things that ended. And by the time you start to hit your 30s, 40s, 50s, and beyond, that archive is pretty full for a lot of people. You've now lived long enough that you can feel the pattern in your bones, because you've got enough completed examples of it to see the shape. You've had the last lift with somebody. You've had the last call, or walk, or meal. The unmarked endings have stopped being theoretical.

• 24:01Jonathan Fields?

  And so, you start, you know, for the first time, to be able to actually see them, to notice them, the way that you can only ever see them, which is by looking back. And now, here's where I want to bring in some actual research, because you know, I'm always a little bit geeky and I like to know if there's research around any of these feelings. Because I had assumed, before I looked into this, that the emotion that we're talking about was basically just kind of sadness with good lighting, right? And it turns out that the people who study things like this for a living, think it's actually something a little bit more interesting than that. There's a researcher named Hal Hershfield. And along with his colleagues, he ran a set of studies on what they call poignancy, specifically

• 24:45Jonathan Fields?

  the emotional experience of meaningful endings. And the setup was pretty elegant. In one version, they had people vividly imagine being somewhere that mattered to them. Right? You can think about, maybe even do it now, right? And then they had them imagine being in that same meaningful place for the last time. And they measured what happened to the emotions. And what you predict is that, you know, the last time version, it just kind of makes people sadder. And it does make them somewhat sadder. That's part real. But the part of the finding that it can't stop sort of like bouncing around about, it's this. It didn't actually make them any less happy. The last timeframe produced this genuinely

• 25:29Jonathan Fields?

  mixed state, sadness and happiness, running at the same time. And the happiness didn't actually drop. The way the researchers describe it is that, you know, the approach of an ending turns happiness into something closer to savoring, kind of with a tinge of sadness that, if anything, seems to deepen gratitude rather than cancel it. So, I actually, I don't know about you, but I actually find that clarifying in a way that's, it's hard to overstate, because what it tells me is that the thing that you feel when you realize something has ended, that ache that, you know, you've maybe been treating as a quote

• 26:09Jonathan Fields?

  "problem," as evidence that you're dwelling, that you're not moving on properly, that you're being morbid, that feeling is not necessarily a malfunction. It's not sadness wearing a costume. It's a specific, recognized, documented emotional state that human beings reliably enter when they stand at the edge of something meaningful that's coming to a close. And it's the finding feature is that it holds the sweet and the bitter at the exact same time, without rejecting one or without either one winning. Which brings

• 26:51Jonathan Fields?

  me back to that word that I will continue to butcher in the way that I pronounce it or pronounce it in only one dialect in only one country, which actually makes people understand sadade, right? Portuguese have been living with this word for centuries. And they built it precisely because cleaner words just wouldn't do the job. It's often said to be one of those untranslatable words, but the closest that I've heard it gets translated to is sort of a longing, or a missing, or nostalgia. And every one of those translations is a little bit wrong, because every one of them is, it's too simple. It's too clean. So, there's a poet, and if you think I butchered the word sadade, I'm probably about to butcher

• 27:34Jonathan Fields?

  their name too, but, "Tetesera de Pasquais, more than 100 years ago, called it the desire for a beloved thing made painful by its absence. And other people describe it kind of more simply as the presence of an absence. The way that someone who is gone is somehow still vividly in the room, precisely by being gone." But the part that matters most for what we're talking about here, the part that I actually want you to hear, is that sadade is, it's not a sad word. There's another saying in Portuguese, and again, so apologize for these pronunciations, "É bom ter sadade." It is good to have sadade, right? Susan Cain,

• 28:19Jonathan Fields?

  in her book Bittersweet, which I absolutely love, gets at the same territory from a slightly different angle. She defines the bittersweet state of mind as "an acute awareness of passing time, paired with a kind of a strange and piercing joy at the beauty of the world." Notice that it's both, the awareness that it's passing and the joy, not in spite of each other, but because of each other. The passing, it's what it makes it beautiful. The fact that the lift was the last one is exactly what makes the light on that run unbearable to remember. So, the people who study this, and the cultures that have lived with it the longest and tried to give language to it, and the writers who spent their lives

• 29:04Jonathan Fields?

  circling it, they're all pointing at the same thing. The ache you feel about the things that ended is not the enemy of joy. It is joy, with the truth that its origin is no longer with you attached. It's what love looks like, once it knows that everything it loves is on the move and will be forever.

• 29:30Jonathan Fields?

  And in part because of that, there's this trap that we fall into in trying to catch them. And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors.

• 29:40Jonathan Fields?

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• 30:24Jonathan Fields?

  USA Salt Lake City Branch. Terms and more at applecard.com. Good Life Project is sponsored by Whatnot. So I love buying books. And for some reason, I especially love buying used books. I just had so much fun, literally minutes ago. I picked up the entire Hunger Games trilogy of books for only $11 and also got this beautiful thank you from the seller and a welcome from all the others in the chat. Whatnot is the largest dedicated live shopping platform. From beauty to luxury fashion, even cookies, and you almost never pay full price. Plus, what really gets me is the other side of the screen. On Whatnot, anyone can sell, whether your business is big or small or doesn't even exist yet. You go live, share what you love, and build relationships with

• 31:09Jonathan Fields?

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• 31:31Speaker 01

  With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One Bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends. It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capitalone.com/bank. Capital One, N.A., Member FDIC.

• 32:05Jonathan Fields?

  I can feel where some of you are going with this potentially, because I went there myself. You're thinking, okay, lesson received. From now on, I'm gonna pay attention. I'm gonna catch them. I'm gonna treat every ordinary moment as precious. I'm gonna be present. I'm gonna just notice every day, unmarked last while they're happening. So I never miss another one, right? I've tried this, and I want to save you the trouble. It doesn't work. And it's worth understanding exactly why it doesn't, because the why is the whole hinge of this conversation. The first reason it doesn't work is, it's kind of simple and

• 32:47Jonathan Fields?

  a little brutal. With every day lasts, you still can't tell which one is the true and final last. That is not a skill you can develop. It's structural. Remember, the last time genuinely looks identical to all the other times from the inside while it's happening. So you'll quote, "I'll, I'll just notice the little last," is like, kind of like saying, you'll just notice which lottery ticket is the winner before they draw the number. The information is not available to you yet. It's only available afterwards. You cannot move it earlier in the timeline by trying harder or paying more attention. But the second reason is the one

• 33:31Jonathan Fields?

  that actually matters, and I think it's actually more insidious. When you try to treat every moment as potentially the last, you don't become more present, you actually become less present, because you're no longer in the moment. You're kind of hovering above it, monitoring it, grading it, asking it whether it's the one that you're supposed to be sad about, or worse, capturing it and sharing it. You've kind of turned your life into a last moment, death watch. And I've done this for strats, pretty much everyone I know has, probably will again. You know, I'd be at dinner with my family, and instead of just being at dinner, I'd be narrating it to myself like it's a nature documentary about an endangered species and observe the teenager in her natural habitat, possibly

• 34:15Jonathan Fields?

  for, you know, like, one of the final times. It is, I promise, deeply annoying to be around a person who is doing this, and it's even more exhausting to be the person doing it. You're not loving the moment. You're not in the moment anymore. You're not actually experiencing it. You're trying to lock it in place, stop time, and you're effectively pre-grieving it without even letting yourself experience it in the first place. And there's also research on this, on what some people call anticipatory nostalgia, the practice of missing something before it's even gone. And turns out, it doesn't actually heighten your enjoyment at all. It does the opposite. It crowds out the actual experience with

• 35:00Jonathan Fields?

  the rehearsal of its loss. Let me repeat that. It crowds out the actual experience with the rehearsal of its loss. You end up grieving a thing that is, at the very moment, still happening, right in front of you, available to be enjoyed while you sit there mourning it. And honestly, you don't need research to tell you that. We have all done that so many times. Intuitively, we all know the truth of this, right? So that's the dead end. You can't catch these moments, these experiences in advance, and trying to, it ruins the very thing you're trying to protect, which would be a pretty bleak place to leave this, except

• 35:42Jonathan Fields?

  that the dead end is actually pointing us towards the way through, because if the problem with the unmarked last is that we miss them, and if trying not to miss them only makes things worse, then maybe, maybe, the real move was never to stop missing them. Maybe the move is to change what we believe the missing means. So here's the reframe that just changed this whole thing for me, and I want to offer to you as plainly as I can. You did not miss the last time because you failed to pay attention. You missed it because

• 36:23Jonathan Fields?

  you were thankfully, gratefully, beautifully inside of it, deeply present with it. So go back to my kitchen for a second, right? The reason I can't find the last day I was my daughter's only partner on the mountain is that, on that day, I was not standing off to the side, watching us taking note, preserving it. I was riding, side by side with her. I was in it. I was so completely inside the experience of being with her, her partner, on the mountain, that I had no spare attention left over to just kind of stand on the outside of it and certify that it was happening. And that, that, that is not

• 37:03Jonathan Fields?

  a bug. That is what it looks like to actually be somewhere. Full presence and careful documentation are, a lot of the time, simply opposites. You can be in the moment, or you can be the person at the concert filming the whole concert on their phone, but it is very hard to be both at once. So the forgetting is not evidence that you didn't care enough. The forgetting when it all happened is the fingerprint, the heartbeat of presence. The reason these moments slip by unmarked is that you were too busy living inside of them to step out and mark them, which means every single unmarked last in your archive is actually

• 37:48Jonathan Fields?

  proof of something. It's proof that you were there, genuinely, deeply there, not hovering above your life, taking attendance, but truly, fully in it. And I can hardly tell you what a relief that was to realize this and to really own it, because I've been carrying this kind of like low-grade guilt, this sense of that a more awake person, a more grateful person, more attentive or attuned person would have caught these moments, and that my failure to catch them meant that I'd somehow squandered them. And it's just not true for you, for me, for anyone. I didn't squander the last lift with my daughter as

• 38:29Jonathan Fields?

  her one and only deep powder ride or die. I rode it. I rode it with her. I was completely, unreservedly present for it. So present that I didn't even know it was the last one. That's not a thing to grieve. That is the best possible way it could have gone. It is the best possible way to live your life. Now, there's a second half to this, and I don't want to skip it, because it's where whatever agency we have actually lives. The unmarked last, the ones already behind you,

• 39:10Jonathan Fields?

  those are settled, right? You can set down the guilt about those, but some lasts are not unmarked, and some of them you can see coming. You know more or less that, you know, your kid has a last year living under your roof, or you know, an aging parent has a finite number of good trips left, or you know that there's a last season coaching the team, a last stretch in the house before you sell it. Those aren't ambushes. Those tend to announce themselves, if you're willing to look. And for those, you can choose to show up fully, not by filming it, which has established that's the trap. It makes you a witness, not a participant, right? Not by narrating it, just like a documentary, trying to capture

• 39:53Jonathan Fields?

  it and tell the story of it, just by being there, all the way there. And maybe once in a while, saying the truth thing out loud, telling the person what this has meant, letting the moment be just exactly as big as it is without trying to kind of bank it for later. That's the only version of being present that actually works. It's not vigilance. It's not catching every sweet momentary last. It's just refusing to look away from the few endings that are kind enough to give you some kind of advance notice.

• 40:28Jonathan Fields?

  So where does this leave all of us? Probably wondering that, right? Because I told you at the top that I want to hand you something that makes the whole thing lighter, that makes the whole idea of unmarked lass lighter. And I want to make good on that. So what I've come to is this, right? Something like this. There are two kinds of lass. And they ask two completely different things of you. The ones that you can see coming, they ask for your presence, not your vigilance, not your phone, not your running internal commentary about how precious this is, just you, actually there, for the handful of endings generous enough to warn you.

• 41:09Jonathan Fields?

  And the ones you've already missed, the whole shadow archive of them, ask for something that sounds almost too simple, but that I found is the harder of the two. They ask for your forgiveness, not because you did anything that needs forgiving, but because most of us are walking around with a faint, kind of unexamined verdict against ourselves, a sense that we should have been more away to our own lives, that we let the good parts slip past unmarked, and that verdict is wrong. You can just drop it. The unmarked lass, they're not receipts for a life you fail to notice, the receipts for a life that you were just too busy living to step outside of. They're sadaje, right?

• 41:53Jonathan Fields?

  And e voluntar sadaje, it is good to have them. So I think about that long sideways light on the last run of the day, the shadows stretched out 40 feet across the snow, and the lift shutting down behind us, the two of us kind of surfing down through all of it, not knowing, not needing to know that we're closing down not just the mountain, but an entire era of our lives. And God willing, we still have many more rides ahead of us, and she'll have many more with friends who share her passion, and I'm so glad that she has that. And I'm glad I didn't know, I really am. If I'd known, I'd have ruined it. I'd have been crying into my goggles, you know, trying to memorize it instead of just riding it with my kid.

• 42:38Jonathan Fields?

  Because, because I didn't know, I got to have it. The whole undivided, ordinary, unrepeatable thing. And now I get to have this sadaje, which it turns out is its own kind of having, the presence of an absence. She's still on that lift with me, just differently. She always will be. That's what the word is for. So I want to leave you with maybe two questions today, and they pull in different directions, which is kind of the point. The first one is forward-looking, and it's gentle, and why don't you actually do something with it? Where in your life right now is there an ending you can already see coming?

• 43:22Jonathan Fields?

  A last year, a last season, a last stretch of something? Not so you can grieve it in advance, so you can be there for it all the way, not to document it, but just show up for it. And the second question is maybe a little bit of the harder one, the more challenging one. I don't want to, I don't want you to rush to answer it also, just kind of let it, let it sit in you. What if the last times you can't remember aren't the ones you failed to notice, but the ones you were most fully alive inside of? I'll ask it again. What if the last times you can't remember, they aren't the ones you failed to notice, but they're the ones you are most fully alive inside of?

• 44:07Jonathan Fields?

  Just let that sit, sit with it, let it rearrange a few things, because I suspect that, like me, you have been carrying a small, gentle bill for all the moments that you think you let slip by, and I would just love to let you consider seriously the possibility that there is nothing to pay, that the slipping by, it was never negligence, that it was the whole time just love, moving at the speed of an actual life. The mountain is still there, so is the light, so in the strange and durable ways that these things work, is every last lift you ever rode without knowing it was the last. That's not a loss to mourn, it is a life you are really, truly in.

• 44:51Jonathan Fields?

  So sit with those, and see what emerges over time. So grateful to have the opportunity to share these ideas with you. And hey, before we leave next week, our guest host Cynthia Mars is sitting down with Susan Bratton to talk about why desire in midlife doesn't fade so much as it gets misread, and what actually rekindles it, along with intimacy at any age. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts, so you don't miss that or any upcoming episode. And do me a quick favor, share this with just one person who's been maybe carrying that guilt about the moments where they've just kind of let them slip by, and leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts.

• 45:33Jonathan Fields?

  It helps us get discovered and bring more people into the conversation. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsay Fox and me, Jonathan Fields, editing help by Troy Young and Alejandro Ramirez, Chris Carter crafted our theme music. And of course, if you haven't already, follow us wherever you get your podcasts, so you never miss a conversation. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.

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