I woke up recently with Viva Forever playing in my head. Which, after the week I've had, felt almost comically appropriate.

There is something about that song that hits differently when you're no longer the little girl listening to the Spice Girls. Back then, Viva Forever sounded dreamy and melancholy without me really understanding why. There was something haunting underneath it, something I could feel long before I had lived enough life to name it. Now I think I understand.

It is the ache of knowing that you can love something deeply and still lose it. That entire chapters of your life can disappear while you're busy living them. That people change, families change, friendships change, bodies change, dreams change, children grow, places that once felt permanent become memories and versions of ourselves might disappear overnight. Nothing lasts forever.

Today, I heard those exact words from someone who has earned the right to say them. At the Fogolar Association porchetta luncheon, one of the elders. He is a 100 year old Italian man. He stood and spoke about life. And somewhere among his words was that simple sentence:

“Nothing lasts forever.”

One hundred years!!!!

Imagine everything a person sees come and go in a century. The world he was born into doesn't exist anymore. He has watched generations arrive, grow older and leave. He has lived through cultural shifts and technological revolutions, through joy and grief, beginnings and endings that probably once felt impossible to survive.

And yet there he is. Still here.There was something about hearing those words today that landed differently for me. Because lately I have been thinking a lot about the end of an era.

Not necessarily one single ending. More like that strange sensation that happens when you can feel your life shifting beneath you. When you know you aren't quite the person you were anymore, but you haven't fully met the person you're becoming.

It's liminal. And liminal spaces are uncomfortable as hell.

We romanticize thresholds in witchcraft. Doorways. Crossroads. Dusk. Dawn. The spaces between worlds. But actually living in one is different. Sometimes the threshold doesn't feel magical. Sometimes it just feels exhausting.

September has always felt like a reset to me. The Monday of the year. Maybe it's some deeply embedded memory of sharpened pencils, new shoes and blank notebooks waiting to be filled, but September carries a different kind of newness than January.

January asks us to reinvent ourselves. September asks us to get back to work. And this September, I feel that deeply.

Eclipse season has passed. We're tangled in retrogrades. Summer is dying around us while autumn slowly creeps in. Everything feels suspended somewhere between what was and what comes next. And I feel suspended there too. Stuck somewhere between my old life and the new one. I haven't wavered. Not once. But I am tired.

There is a particular exhaustion that comes from carrying everything while simultaneously trying to build something new. From being the person holding everyone else up while silently realizing your own arms are shaking. But there is too much work to do.

There are things I want to create. Things I want to change. People I want to love. Stories I have to tell. There are parts of myself I am ready to leave behind and parts I'm still grieving even though I know I've outgrown them.

Maybe that's what the end of an era actually feels like. Not a dramatic door slamming shut, although sometimes it does change dramatically. But rather the subtle realization that you cannot go backward.

And maybe that's why Viva Forever found me again.

A song from childhood about forever, returning when I'm old enough to understand that forever was never really the point. Maybe impermanence is what gives our lives their urgency. If everything lasted forever, we could always say it tomorrow.

But the reality is that nothing lasts forever. Not our childhoods, not summer, not grief, not exhaustion, not the version of yourself you thought you'd always be. And thankfully, not the hardest seasons of our lives either. Our pain certainly doesn’t last forever.

Endings are painful, but they are also full of possibility. An ending creates space where there wasn't any before. Sometimes the life we're desperately trying to hold together has to loosen its grip before something brighter can begin.

So perhaps the lesson isn't to fear that nothing lasts forever. Perhaps it's to be here while it does. To remember what September feels like and to let ourselves mourn an ending without mistaking grief for regret. And then, somehow, keep going. Because there is too much work left to do, children to raise and tomorrows to have. So we prevail.

And despite knowing that nothing lasts forever, we continue doing the most beautifully human thing imaginable. We wait with bated breath for tomorrow.