06/22/2026
Worth the read for sure
I had to accept. That's how a quietly devastating poem by Silvia Schmitt begins, and what follows is a long, unflinching meditation on the one lesson every human being must eventually learn and almost all of us resist for as long as we possibly can: that everything is temporary, that nothing here truly belongs to us, and that learning to hold life with open hands instead of clenched fists is the only path to peace. I won't reproduce the poem in full — it's Schmitt's own work — but I want to walk through what it teaches, because it's the kind of wisdom most people only arrive at after a great deal of living, and it's offered here as a gift to anyone willing to hear it early.
The poem moves through a series of acceptances, each one harder than the last, like a person slowly making peace with the actual terms of being alive. It begins with time itself — that strange, slippery thing that escapes our understanding, that we can never quite grasp or hold or slow down. We spend our lives trying to manage time, save it, control it, and the poem starts by simply admitting defeat: time cannot be mastered. It flows past us regardless of what we want, and the first act of wisdom is to stop pretending otherwise.
From there it turns to the body — fragile, fleeting, mortal. The poem accepts plainly that the body is not immortal, that it will age, and that one day it will slowly disappear. This is the acceptance we work hardest to avoid. Entire industries exist to help us deny it. But the poem refuses the denial. It looks directly at the fact of our physical impermanence and accepts it, not with despair, but with a kind of clear-eyed calm. The body is borrowed. It was always going to be returned. Pretending otherwise doesn't make us safer; it just makes us more afraid.
Then the poem says something beautiful about what we're actually made of: that we are built from memories, but also from forgettings; from unrealized desires, from noise and from silence, from fleeting whispers and starry nights, woven together into stories made of small, subtle details. There's tenderness in that. A human life isn't a monument; it's a fabric of tiny moments, most of which we'll forget, many of which never went the way we hoped. The poem accepts even the forgetting and the unfulfilled longing as part of the weave — not flaws in the design, but the design itself. A life is made of subtle details, and most of them pass quietly, and that's exactly what makes them precious.
The hardest acceptances come in the middle. The poem accepts that parents will not live forever. That children will one day fly away and carve out their own paths, far from us. And then it says the thing that takes most people decades to understand: that our children never truly belonged to us, as we imagined for a moment they did. Their freedom to come and go and choose was always as precious as the love we held for them. This is one of the deepest and most difficult truths in the whole poem. We love people — our children, our parents, our partners — and love tricks us into feeling that they're ours, that we possess them, that they belong to us. The poem gently corrects this. No one belongs to anyone. The people we love are not our property; they're free beings passing through our lives, and their freedom is not a threat to our love but a part of its beauty. To love someone is not to own them. It's to cherish them precisely because they're free.
Then the poem turns to possessions, and it's merciless in the kindest way. Everything I own is only a loan. Nothing here below is really mine. Everything, like my own existence, is passing, destined to be left to other hands when my time comes. We spend so much energy acquiring, holding, protecting what's "ours" — and the poem reminds us that we own none of it, not really. We're temporary custodians of things that will outlive us and pass to strangers. The house, the possessions, the carefully gathered belongings — all of it is on loan, all of it will be handed on. Recognizing this doesn't make life meaningless; it makes our grip looser and our hearts lighter.
There's a striking image near the heart of the poem: that even sweeping the sidewalk in front of the house every morning was a sweet self-deception — a gesture to convince oneself that this little corner of the world was mine, when it never was. My home, my shelter — only a temporary roof that will one day hold other lives, other stories. That detail of sweeping the sidewalk is so ordinary and so piercing. It captures the small daily rituals by which we try to claim ownership over a world that was never ours to keep. The home we think of as ours is just a roof passing through our hands on its way to the next family, the next set of stories. We're all just briefly living in spaces that will hold other lives after we're gone.
The poem doesn't pretend this is easy. It admits that our attachment to things, to people, to places, will only make the moment of goodbye more painful. The trees we planted, the flowers we tended, the birds we listened to — all were only passing through, just like us. This is the cost of love and attachment laid bare: the more tightly we hold, the more it hurts to let go. And yet the poem doesn't conclude that we should stop loving or stop tending or stop planting. It simply asks us to hold it all with the awareness that it's temporary — to love the trees and the flowers and the birds fully, while knowing they, and we, are only here for a while.
It even accepts the hardest thing of all: that one day, we will be forgotten. Life will keep flowing without us, like a river indifferent to our memory. That's a hard sentence to sit with. We want to matter permanently, to be remembered, to leave a mark that lasts. The poem accepts that we won't, not really — that the river of life flows on, indifferent, and that this is simply the nature of things.
And then, having stripped away every illusion of permanence and ownership, the poem lands on its one quiet conclusion, the only thing it says actually belongs to us: so let us take care of our soul, for it is the only thing that truly belongs to us. That's the gift hidden at the end of all that letting go. When you accept that you own none of it — not the body, not the people, not the possessions, not even your place in others' memories — you're left with one thing that is genuinely, inalienably yours: your soul, your inner self, the quality of the person you choose to be. Everything else is borrowed. That alone is yours to tend.
This is why the poem moves people so deeply. It doesn't offer false comfort or pretend that impermanence isn't painful. It looks directly at the hardest facts of being alive — that we age, that we lose people, that we own nothing, that we'll be forgotten — and instead of despairing, it finds a strange peace on the other side. Because once you truly accept that everything is temporary and nothing is truly yours, you're freed from the exhausting work of clutching. You can love people without owning them. You can enjoy things without being enslaved by them. You can live in your home and tend your garden and sweep your sidewalk, knowing it's all on loan, and somehow love it more for being temporary.
The poem's title and refrain — I had to accept — names the whole spiritual task of a human life. Not to fight reality, not to deny impermanence, not to pretend we'll keep what we love forever, but to accept the actual terms of existence and find peace inside them. Take care of your soul. It's the one thing that's really yours. Everything else, you're only holding for a little while — so hold it gently, love it fully, and be ready, when the time comes, to pass it on with open hands.
