Sunday Night With John: Leaving On A Jet Plane

Leaving On A Jet Plane

John Paul Derryberry

Tomorrow is an exciting day. We finally move. Today, though, today is a sad day. It’s 11:06 on Saturday night and our bags are packed. We wake up tomorrow with a bright future, but today we mourn what was, and what we are leaving behind. It’s what happens when eras come to an end. Anne, my wife has been in Iowa City roughly the last 18 years, and for me it’s been the last seven. We started our life together in this wonderful town, with amazing people who shaped our early relationship. We talked this week of the others who moved away first and those we love still here.

Tonight we paid a couple of baby sitters and took one last gallivant around town to our favorite stomping grounds. For me, it’s never about the missing the place, we can always return and see the sights and soak in the sounds of our favorite places. It’s the people I’ve met and how they shaped me that I can’t shake from my thoughts this late night. Oh the people this place gave me.  That’s why this is hard, moving away and starting a new life means never seeing some of these people again. It’s not a fun fact to come to grips with but it’s the truth. Life gets busy and we all mean it when we say, until we meet again, but the reality is for a couple of relationships in my life, they end tomorrow when the cars leave the city limits. It’s the nature of things, they begin, they have a middle and they end.

It’s perfectly normal and totally okay that some relationships end. It allows us to add new people to our lives that give us new perspectives, teach us new things about life. It’s sad though that is the method to life. We only have the capacity for so many people. For me it comes down to these people I may never see again and I hope when they think back upon our interactions they feel I improved their life, that I was honest, hopefully funny, and gave them memories shaping a better version of themselves.  It’s a rule I try to govern myself by: leave people better than you found them.

I have not always lived up to this rule; no one lives up to all their rules, all the time. As I get older it’s the life guideline that I revisit the most when interacting with people. We get such a short amount of time with the people we love, the people who have the ability to move us, that doing anything other than making their life better seems so small. We can do it through laughter, through serious conversations, through attending events together, but we do leave an imprint on people. They are either better for knowing us or they are not. I’m a better man today than I ever was and it’s from meeting and interacting with so many beautiful people in this area. If this is the end of the road for some of our relationships, I hope when you think of me, you think the same. I made your life better. It’s the best thing we can do for one another.