Troy P Zehnder

People move through our lives in seasons.

Some leave little trace.
Others leave fingerprints that only become visible much later, after time, loss, and experience have done their work.

There are people we love without realizing the full weight of it in the moment. Not because we didn’t care, but because we didn’t yet understand what we were being given.

That understanding almost never arrives on time.

Often, it comes years later, quietly, when life has removed the noise and the distractions that once made everything feel replaceable.

It’s then that many people realize they didn’t walk away from something flawed.
They walked away from something rare.

At the time, it didn’t feel rare. It felt safe. Familiar. Available. Something that would still be there while other options were explored, other paths tried, other versions of life tested.

And that’s the mistake most humans make, not out of cruelty, but out of immaturity.

We assume that what loves us openly, without judgment, without conditions, is durable enough to wait. We treat depth like infrastructure instead of a gift.

That assumption feels reasonable, until time proves otherwise.

Because safety chosen out of exhaustion isn’t the same as commitment chosen out of clarity. And shelters, when mistaken for foundations, eventually erode.

When they do, what remains isn’t dramatic regret. It’s something quieter and more enduring.

A haunting awareness.

Not “I lost them.”
But “I didn’t know what I had when it was still available.”

This realization doesn’t belong to one relationship or one person. It belongs to the human condition.

Almost everyone reaches a point where they finally understand the cost of being loved without judgment, often only after that love is no longer accessible. Not because it was taken away, but because time changed the people involved and the conditions that made it possible.

By the time clarity arrives, the moment for choice has passed.

That’s not tragedy.
That’s formation.

Some loves aren’t meant to last forever. They exist to teach us what reverence feels like before we know how to offer it in return.

The purpose of that kind of love isn’t permanence, it’s instruction.

And the regret that sometimes follows isn’t meant to imprison us in the past. It’s meant to reshape how we recognize value going forward.

Because once we’ve lived long enough to understand this, we are no longer the same people who once mistook availability for guarantee.

We become quieter. Slower. More careful with what is offered to us.

And if that awareness arrives too late for one chapter, it doesn’t arrive too late for life.

It arrives exactly when it’s supposed to, so that the next time something rare stands in front of us, we don’t need hindsight to recognize it.