Learning to say goodbye

TODAY is one of those times when I have to say "goodbye" to a long list of friends. The company I am working in has decided to give 29 colleagues of mine a minor "golden handshake" in a downsizing exercise.
Some of these outgoing people have put in more than 30 years' service and I have known them for a better part of three decades. I wish there was an easier way to say "goodbye".
When you have known a person for more than one generation, there is a certain understanding that defies explanation or necessitates explanation. That outgoing person has become "family" a long time ago. Sometimes, they are even closer than family members.
I am one of those who is very slow in changing friends because I have always been slow in choosing one. But I like friends. I bear in mind that they are just like me with hopes, dreams, frustrations and ambitions born either of desperation or design.
These colleagues, some of them are nodding acquaintances, have been around for so long that all of us have taken one another for granted. Office relations are like that. We take each other for granted until we know we will lose sight of each other almost forever. We are not sure if we will see each other again and the moment of that realisation makes the friendship suddenly so precious.
Of course, I am sentimental. That what's makes me so human like the rest of the others. Sometimes, life is so fickle. One minute you see a person, the next day, you come upon an obituary of that person. In that one moment in time, you will have cross a gulf that separates this life and the afterlife.
I have had that kind of experience several times in my life. Each face is precious to me in its own perculiar way. I cherish the moments I share with my office colleagues, many of whom have become precious friends.
Occasionally, in hindsight, years later, I think of all the nice things I should have said to their face. Those were opportunities lost. How fragile is the thread of life. If only more of us know this, we will treat each encounter with our colleague as if it were our last, and one day it will.
Now, as I ponder the journey of life that stretches ever so long in front of me, I stare for long seconds at the people I know will leave the arena which has been our playing ground. It has been so long. The years of talking nonsense. The years of watching each other developed in our own unique ways.
Such is the ethereal nature of our existence. When all is faded and gone, we glance back and wonder if it had been all a dream. We think we exist merely for our own interests, and then we find out that it has been one big carousel. All of us interact as God intends it to be.
Each living friend a lesson to us, as it is we for them. It is an endless cycle.
The light that shines comes not from the distance in front of us but it comes from within us.