Reflecting on a snippet of an old conversation with my friend Jess, I consider the radical choice to have a good thing and let it go.

I’ve known Jessica ‘Jess’ Searle since I was 17, her a year older and a good few years wiser. When I joined her at university, she invited me round for dinners, showed me around her home, and introduced me to what I came to believe to be one of the prettiest cities in the small world as I knew it.

When COVID-19 sent students home, we found our university experiences abruptly altered. Before we knew it, Jess was finishing her degree and I could feel, with some horror, the same fate coming towards me in a year’s time. ‘Panic master’s’ were words floating on many of our peers’ tongues: the idea of applying to a master’s programme simply to spend an extra year as a student, delaying an entrance into the world of work.

I know Jess as interesting and eloquent and asked if I could interview her over a video call during the pandemic. She was only too pleased to oblige.

Discussing the temptation to draw out the time spent as a student, Jess said the line I’ve been carrying around with me ever since: “Sometimes, things need to end while they’re still good”.

Sometimes, she explained, things are brilliant, and we want them to continue this way for another couple of months, another few years, or perhaps forever. But — she said — wouldn’t you rather let something end and be able to look back on it as good, the best of times, rather than drag it out, hoping for more of the same, only to end up with a curious mixture of regret and nostalgia at having been close to, but never quite achieving, what you once had?

This struck me as an idea that was quite radical: the idea that we could have a good thing, understand and accept it as a good thing, and nonetheless let it go. It’s something that has brought me a lot of comfort since; we can take joy in things despite their (known) non-permanence. Jess’s statement was about leaving university, but I think it can also be applied to other contexts.

It was reassuring to read a book about four philosopher alumnae of my college and to see quite tangibly how short the university chapters of their lives were and how, quite frankly, some of the most interesting stuff came after. It was reassuring to me to see Jess throw herself into life post-uni as much as she had during it. Some things end, some things end well, and some things don’t really end at all. Endings are rarely as clean as we expect them to be. Jess is enjoying her first job, and Jess has made new friends. Jess continues to invite me to dinner. ∎