Nothing New Under the Sun
I have met my first love at least ten times.
It started with a boy I knew for only a few chaotic, sunburned months when I was eighteen and “finding myself” in southern California. He was a free spirit in the way only teenage boys can be: allergic to plans, magnetized by late-night adventures, and convinced that the world would rearrange itself to meet his appetite for it. He had a skateboard and a loud electric guitar that he didn’t know how to play. I had my heart on my sleeve and a naivety that I desperately tried to conceal with foul language and too much liquid eyeliner. We walked in the valley during sunset and got high with our friends, talking about music and God and eating suspicious dining hall food in each other’s cramped dorm rooms at 4 a.m. We spent weekends on the beach and sketched each other’s faces in dusty charcoal that stained my sheets. We were reckless, and I was certain that intensity meant permanence, which, I suppose, is just another definition of being young and in love.
When I left San Diego, I left him in it. I’ve never seen him again, and yet I continue to run into him years later. He seems to be a draft of a person that I keep revising—I’ve noticed characteristics of him in the guys that I date, friendships I make, professors whose lectures I sit through, and it’s sparked the question: Are we ever really meeting new people, or just old lessons in new bodies? At what point does pattern recognition become projection? I’ve often wondered if the point of life is to keep relearning the same lessons over and over again. Patience is a professor who rarely gives out A’s, and I question if there is ever mastery.
I once listened to a Buddhist man on the internet preach about “freeing ourselves from suffering” and that the concept of Nirvana was simply the point at which one is free from repeating lessons and karmic accumulation. What stuck with me wasn't that the idea sounded necessarily radical, but that it felt remembered, familiar—like maybe I’d heard a version of it before in Sunday school or at my grandmother’s kitchen counter. It’s strange how the same lectures linger in the back of our minds, especially when they have to do with something we all tend to forget about five minutes later, like becoming better versions of ourselves. After all, from Ecclesiastes to the Quran, stoic philosophy to Hindu cosmology, the overarching lesson is the same: Humans learn in cycles.
The Stoics wrote of fate as a curriculum, an uncontrollable path towards inner tranquility, towards Apatheia. Epictetus insisted that while fate itself is not ours to command, our responses to the events in our lives are. Similarly, Marcus Aurelius wrote that the same dramas have unfolded since the beginning of time, only with different people, different “actors” on the stage of life. He believed that “all things from eternity are of like forms and come round in a circle.” In Hindu philosophy, this same recurrence is formalized in the doctrine of Samsara, the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, where the soul returns again and again until it has learned what it must. Across traditions separated by distance and time, the cultural consensus is that human beings are creatures of repetition, and wisdom lies not in avoiding the cycle, but in becoming conscious within it. If this is true, then maybe my first love was never a singular person, but the first iteration of my lesson in understanding what connection is, what purity is, what intimacy is. That boy in San Diego wasn’t extraordinary, but he reflected my hunger to be chosen, and that was enough for me to confuse chemistry with destiny. The older I get, the more I suspect that life is less about making the “right” choice and more about making the different choice. Every difficult crossroad in life is an invitation to try something new, to take a chance, and to respond differently than we have before. Maybe that’s all growth is: It’s not that the lessons disappear, but their grip on you softens each time you are brave enough to look them in the face.
Mastery may not be achievable, but the best we can do is recognize the lessons placed before us and try to face them head on. Just as King Solomon wrote roughly 3000 years ago, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” I used to read that verse as cynical, but now I find it to be liberating. The lessons this world has to offer chase us for a reason, and it’s not our job to outrun them, but to understand them—to understand that they have chased billions before us and will continue to chase the billions that come after us. I have met my first love at least ten times, and perhaps I’ll meet him ten more. I may have lessons to learn, but when love keeps reappearing in familiar disguises, I’ll always greet that spark with a smile.
Written by Lillian Glassmoyer, Design: Jili Dai, Social Media: Zaara Hashmy