Some experiences earn their value by ending

Some experiences are valuable precisely because they do not need to be repeated.

That took me a long time to understand, because we’re taught the opposite. We’re taught that if something mattered—if it shaped us, fed us, expanded us—then wanting to return to it is proof of its value. And if we don’t want to return, we’re expected to regret it, condemn it, or explain ourselves.

But experience taught me something quieter.

The problem was never individual actions. It was patterns.

With certain habits, for example, the harm wasn’t in the act itself. It was in the repetition. The stopping and starting. The oscillation between resolve and relapse, enjoyment and judgment. The constant resetting of the same cycle. The damage lived in the loop, not in any single choice.

I learned that what hurts most isn’t doing something once. It’s doing it again after you already know where it leads.

That understanding followed me into other parts of my life.

Travel, for instance. It wasn’t travel I was saying goodbye to. It was the lifestyle my way of traveling required. The constant movement. The improvisation. The eating from whatever was available. The belief that motion itself was regulation.

Accepting that I can’t live that way and stay healthy is no different from accepting that I can’t eat from the fridge and stay healthy. The act itself isn’t immoral. It’s just incompatible with the body I have now.

Some modes of living stop fitting—not because they were wrong, but because they’ve delivered all the information they were ever going to deliver.

This also changed how I understand relationships.

When people talk about “being friends again,” they often mean forgiveness. But for me, it was never about forgiving. It was about what reopening would require. Re-entering closeness. Recreating vulnerability. Trusting again where trust hadn’t held. Forgetting what experience had already taught me.

That wasn’t healing. That was repetition.

Peace gave me something closeness never did. It gave me resolution. I stopped working that problem. I let the relationship be what it was and allowed the past to remain complete. I learned that forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting. It means letting go of the demand that the past produce a different future.

Culturally, regret is treated as proof of growth. We’re told that if something was truly behind us, we should condemn it. That not wanting to repeat something must mean we now see it as bad.

I no longer believe that.

Age has taught me that some things were good, formative, even joyful—and still not worth repeating. Not because they failed, but because they finished.

I don’t need to see past chapters as mistakes in order to close them. I don’t need to vilify what once worked in order to stop doing it.

Some experiences earn their value by ending.

The wisdom isn’t in returning to them to prove we learned something.

The wisdom is in recognizing when the lesson is complete.

Not everything meaningful is meant to be revisited.

Some things are valuable because they are over.

WE&P by: EZorrillaMc&Co.