LIVE FAST, WRITE OFTEN.

Nothing gold can stay.

Written by Cole Schafer

It's difficult to fully appreciate something until it's no longer there. I had this unsettling realization at 3 a.m. this morning when I found myself without an arm. Or, so I thought.

I was awoken from a dead sleep feeling that something was very much off. I felt an empty void on the right side of my body. I went to clutch my arm and was horrified by how foreign it felt––as if it did not belong to me but a stranger that had crawled into bed with me in the middle of the night.

I stood up, shook my arm around like a rag doll and massaged the feeling back into it until it felt like my own flesh again. As I laid back down and quickly drifted back to sleep, I remember feeling a sudden newfound appreciation for the limb I that had never truly possessed before.

One of the great challenges of the human experience is learning to truly appreciate before having lost. Loss is inevitable. It's as natural as the setting of the sun––and like the setting of the sun, it can't be prevented.

Robert Frost said it best when he wrote the words, "Nothing gold can stay."