All Good Things Must Come To An End

                It's over. The fat lady has sung, the curtain has fallen, time to go and leave it all behind. Over the years, we have found as a species that when something is really great, the time in which it occurs seems to accelerate so much that it's hard to enjoy it while you're in the midst of it. It's just flashing by too quickly. No matter how wonderful or spectacular something is, it must come to an end eventually. I witnessed proof of that today.
               Over the past few days, I have been volunteering at my old middle school to do the hair and makeup of the cast of their production of Hairspray. I was in the musicals every year myself when I was a middle schooler. Today was their last show, and the memories of my last shows in the choruses of High School Musical and Les Miserables. Before the last show, the dressing rooms and makeup areas are filled with flashes of cameras, and extra jitters to make the last show the best one. The show is as wonderful as could be, and then after the curtain falls, the eighth graders whose last year it is at the middle school - boys and girls alike -  break down into tears.
               Being in something that takes as much incredible amounts of time and energy as it does to put on a show the caliber of this isn't something that can be taken lightly. It becomes something so big that your life revolves around it for the several months of many hour practices a day, running lines, and rehearsing dances that when it's all taken away so suddenly, you feel just a little bit empty for a while. However, during these months of rehearsal, it's a never ending stream of complaints of exhaustion and fatigue. The songs get repetitive, and you're just ready for it to be over. Then when it's done, you couldn't want anything more than to have just one more show.
               I find the similar effect with almost anything. Take school dances: during them, it's a crazy amount of fun, but your feet are killing you, it's boiling hot, swaying your hips back and forth has begun to seem a little redundant, and your ears are begin to take on a high pitched ringing sound. Then when it's all over, you just want to relive the night in your head over and over again. Vacations is the other big one. When you've been gone from home for a week and you're still in a hotel, eating foreign food, struggling to understand the heavily accented voices around you, you begin to long for the comfort of your own bed. Then when you're back, you can't believe the vacation ended so soon.
             These amazing things can last a few hours, weeks, months, years, maybe even for the rest of your life...but like I said, sooner or later, all good things must come to an end eventually. So when you're living through something great, stop and look around. Make sure you're experiencing it from the inside out, you'll regret the end a lot less, and have a lot more memories to relive when all is said and done.
             The curtain has fallen.