For the last eight years, a thought has haunted me: that there is possibly nothing sadder, more tragic, cripplingly awful, than having obtained rare and important knowledge through experience, painful experience, blood and sweat and tears and agonizing self-inventory… only for the situations to do things right never to happen again.

I used to relate the concept to that of the quarterback who spends his entire career (and likely the better part of his life) who finally makes it to the Super Bowl, and makes a mistake that costs the team the championship, but learns from that and practices and studies and works impossibly hard to correct his technique and mindset, only to suffer a career ending injury in the first game of the next season.

I’ve spent my life in pursuit of knowledge. Sometimes the knowledge is book knowledge in whatever specific arena my ADD-riddled squirrel brain picks — music, astronomy, literature. Much more is experiential, especially concerning myself.

In my early twenties, I found myself very suddenly without any idea of who I was (coming out of a badly co-dependent relationship, where I had become convinced that I needed to be someone entirely different than myself to make her happy). It was truly the hardest time of my life (thanks, clinical depression!), but turns out in hindsight that hitting rock bottom means that you have nowhere to go but up. I was able to rediscover who and more importantly why I am, to discard the parts of me that weren’t valuable or meaningful or joyful, to redefine myself as I wanted to be seen, as opposed to how I thought others wanted to see me.

My last relationship was wonderful for my learning. I had developed some bad traits over my last marriage, and was completely unaware of them until M pointed them out to me. And some of those traits led to absolutely horrible, brutal fights, which eventually led to us splitting (but still remaining close friends, thankfully). But those fights, as awful and in some ways scarring as they were, led me to learning – about myself, about relating to others, about what I want and need and how to communicate better.

And then… I spent nearly a decade alone, and that thought – of wasted knowledge – would creep in often.

Look, there’s gonna be a final everything, and eventually unused knowledge. On a long enough timescale, the survivability rate of everything is reduced to zero. There will be a last song heard, a last book read, a final sentence written, one last ‘I love you’ spoken and meant. I know this in my logical brain, but my primal lizard headmeat fights it tooth and claw.

But in my current case, I’ve been given a second chance, and I’m grateful beyond expression to the universe for that. And like the fabled Phoenix (or in my case, her distant relative the Dumpster Phoenix), I will treat it as my last — using all my learned knowledge to make it the best it can be, and to learn everything I can to make it even better still.