The end of love.

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“Sacrifice the things you used to believe, and the ways you used to be. Learning leaves a trail of little deaths.”

— Derek Sivers

“When you cling, what you offer the other is not love but a chain by which both you and your beloved are bound. Love can only exist in freedom.”

— Anthony De Mello

My son smacks his lips if I’ve just offered him something to eat when he’s hungry, like a cartoon dog offered a prime cut of meat. And in this moment, I’ve just offered him a snack, and he stands expectantly in front of me as I retrieve it from my bag, his face smudged with dirt and his hair in disarray. His playground play was briefly paused as he heard the magic words “cheese sandwich”.

Now, even more cartoon-like, he stuffs his mouth with the whole thing using the palm of his hand, and before he’s begun chewing, he turns towards the playground slide and trots away without looking back. In that moment, for the millionth time in my three years as a dad, I feel heartbroken.

All the cliches are true; the love you feel for your child is a unique feeling, a thing in its own right different to any other. I feel it as heartbreak because every moment of love as a father carries with it the knowledge that what I am bestowing is ultimately in service of letting go of the person I care most about: one day, one way or another, he must leave me.

Is there any sweeter agony than that?

And so the moment, like so many others, is savoured as sweet and bitter, another part of an absurd yet endlessly glorious ordeal that we put ourselves through as parents, nurturing and loving a child, knowing that it cannot last as it is.

In just a few years, he will be much more independent, perhaps less keen to hold hands and cuddle, much more keen to play with friends or alone. A few more after that, and his self-reliance will have evolved further, interests and relationships far outside the family unit, days or even weeks spent away.

Add a few more years, and he’s a teenager, a proto-adult flooded with hormones and keen to stamp his independence on his runway to one day leave home and spread his wings. All being well, the love is still there, and the relationship is still strong, but the shape of it will have changed; there is less dependency, much less attachment and the centre of gravity shifts until he eventually leaves our orbit altogether.

Love and grief are enmeshed in parenting, a series of initiations for child and adult, calling us both to change and adapt. To let go too early is fraught with risk, although far less common. To let go too late is to stunt the very person you love most, to clip their wings. Letting go, in all cases, is essential.

A few weeks ago, our cellar unit in the basement of our apartment block was broken into. We’d already had a break in a couple of months before and, foolishly, we’d had the door repaired but not removed the most valuable items. They came back and this time took my snowboard bag, filled with all of my gear: snowboard, bindings, boots, goggles, helmet, gloves, avalanche kit and more.

My heart sank when I realised it was gone. The first sting was the value of what had been taken, somewhere around two thousand euros of high-quality equipment accumulated over many years.

The second sting, that came quickly and surprisingly after that, was the sentimental value of the kit: the beautiful and remote backcountry adventures it had served me through, the many rock faces around the world that had shredded my gloves and the gaffer tape that was holding them together, the wild and dangerous days in a Pyrenean snowstorm where both pairs of my goggles became completely useless, even the thick and hardy snowboarding socks an ex-girlfriend had given me many years ago.

I’m not particularly attached to ‘stuff’, so this threw me, and it took a day or so for the feeling to fade. And then I realised what else hurt: I was unlikely to replace this gear. I’d bought it in the years when I had plenty of money and free time, both of which are in short supply now.

But it was not even that; there was another layer underneath that one. I had already begun to feel uncomfortable with the idea of flying to mountainous places, knowing my travel was damaging the very thing I cherished; I couldn’t ignore the dissonance of burning jet fuel in the atmosphere in order to slide down glaciers that retreat every year.

The last trip I’d planned was three years ago, by train to Austria, and I had to cancel it when the first-ever nationwide train strike in Germany was announced just before my departure. It felt like a message, and a sad one. The snow-line across European mountains gets higher every year; by the time my son is an adult, some glaciers will have melted entirely.

When I saw my snowboard had been stolen, the deeper, more painful thought in my head was this: ‘Will I ever ski or snowboard again? Perhaps this is it?’

A luxury problem you might think - and you’d be right - but my days in the high mountains around the world rank as the happiest memories of my life, the place where I feel most alive.

It was the visceral sense of loss I was feeling, however frivolous or unimportant it might be in the bigger scheme of things. It revealed my attachment to a pursuit and an identity that I may need to let go of forever; that day is or was always going to come.

Which brings me to football, more specifically, playing football. After books, football is my earliest and longest love, beginning on the day I joined in a game at junior school, got stuck in goal and comically air-kicked an approaching ball only to then backheel it into my own goal - I kid you not.

I didn’t realise it at the time, but I’d fallen madly in love with something. I played and played, practiced and practiced, and gradually improved. I’d spend long summer and winter days outdoors with my friends, forgetting my hunger and returning home covered in mud and with bloodied knees.

By the time I was 13, I made the school team, something I was immensely proud of and determined to prove myself. And since then, I have played some sort of organised football, more or less non-stop. 35 years in which I’ve broken bones, torn countless ligaments and muscles, split tendons, and had surgery four times, leaving me with metal and screws holding parts of me together.

Each time I ended up in A&E or in the operating room, friends and family would say to me, often in earnest tones, “Do you think it’s time you quit?”

“You don’t understand,” I would reply.

And it has caught up with me. Fragile ankles, collapsed arches, knees that ache in every season, hips that make me wince when I stand, and new back problems every year. It’s all worth it. I wouldn’t change any of it. It’s ridiculous, I know, but then love is.

A few months ago, a friend introduced me to an indoor football game here in Berlin. It’s perfect: Tuesday evenings, a good standard, a nice group of guys, and intensely competitive without being unfriendly. After the first couple of weeks, I returned home feeling thrilled, joyous and alive in a way that only team sports can make me feel.

Then the injuries. Strained groin muscles, a torn hip flexor, more back problems. I had to drop out a couple of months ago, focusing on recovery and now building up the conditioning to go back with targeted exercises. Which makes no rational sense at all: I’m 48 and riddled with injuries, all of these guys are in their 20s or 30s.

But I’ll go back again, like a moth to a flame, because I’m in love and because I’m not ready to let go. A grown man unable to face the music, to accept his decline, to take the last dance - all the fucking cliches are true in me.

I’m too in love with something that is, in the greater arc of my life, utterly meaningless. Perhaps I’m too attached to the identity too; perhaps I’m not yet ready to be someone who ‘used to play football when he was younger’.

Attachment is not love, is what I’m trying to say. Happiness is not love. Stasis is not love. Sentimentality is not love. Love is change, love is letting go, love is loss, and love is also sadness and grief.

It is not about killing the joy or being an unfeeling robot. Quite the opposite: it is about fully feeling the entirety of what we love, including in its decay and death. It is feeling the discord and friction of what must change, the pain of what must end or leave us. It is knowing when things must end, however excruciating that might feel.

In the inevitable changes, losses and endings that mark being human, love is always there, but in a different form, still entangled with the heavier surface feelings, but just out of sight.

It is the fullness of our feeling rather than the avoidance or denial of it that enables us to close chapters and open new ones, with the wisdom that only grief can provide and the energy that is only released when something has come to its proper end.

However painful it might seem, there is love in wholeheartedly accepting and honouring everything that is ending.

I’m a leadership coach, consultant and facilitator living in Berlin.

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[main image, ‘Letting Go’ by Melanie Meyer]