It all ends

I'm sitting working on my computer in a cafe. There's an old man, perhaps 75 years, sitting at an adjacent table. He wears a beige cardigan and dons a white beard on his otherwise bald head. His glasses are delicate and he leans an intricately carved cane against the table.

I spend so much time in cafes—hours per day—but rarely stop to think what will become or where I'll end up. I'm generally self-absorbed, wondering when I'll find a lover or a new career or a shimmer of elation in a sea of confusion. But, at the end of all of it, we're all alone. The man sitting alone at the cafe.

If only we realized sooner that all our attachments and confusion and jealousy and emotion and everything we experience every single day will one day inevitably and quietly ... end.