Goodbye My Friend
Farewell old friend. I find that I’m sad to see you go. For a decade we have known each other, worked together. When first we met I didn’t understand you; didn’t know your past or purpose. But we grew closer. I came to understand how you thought and worked, and you showed me the right questions to ask to tease out the answers we needed. I learned patience, and you were always there waiting for me to do so.
Not everyone understood you like I did. Not everyone liked you. I defended you often, explained why you were the way you are and how you ought to be approached. Some didn’t care – preferred to pout and curse, to sulkily reject what wasn’t their way. They tended towards failure. You helped me see that those who most vocally blame others are themselves to blame. There are those who will never grasp a need or necessity outside of their own selfish sphere, yet you were there for them all; even when reviled. You never failed to provide what was required, never turned away from those doubters, fearers, haters. They turned from you.
I turned to you for answers; for a fixed point in a whirling world. We have travelled together you and I. Changed, improved, grown stronger, clearer – resolute. When asked to provide, we did. When called to account, we did. When called to change, to explain, to assist, to shape – all these we did, and more. I feel keenly the loss of one I know so well, so reliable, so true. Farewell old friend.
I know you inside and out, can direct you from memory, tell the trail through you in my sleep. That trail will soon be gone, blown away in the breeze of change. Yet your legacy will live on. They won’t even realise until you’re gone, that your mind is retained, passed on into the future. The precision and decisions you required are all still present. But those who see only the outer, the superficial layer and think that this is all there is will believe your successor to be a wholly novel beast. As always, they will be wrong.
For those who never wanted to know you, who resisted the knowledge you would have granted them- the ease of query and response, from some futile gesture of innate arrogance, how soon will they miss you too. How sweet shall be the sound of their whining imprecations against the new. Never will they realise how old the new is. All that could be passed on has been, in memory, in action, in function. Those surface-dwellers will never learn the new, never grasp its use but will bemoan that which was lost, that which they never wanted, that which they never knew. Perhaps they will miss you the most.
Farewell old friend.
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