Reflections on someone leaving.

One of the worst things about this business--a business, frankly, that these days is filled with bad things--is when someone talented and special leaves your group.

Maybe it's not amazing, but it amazes me still how close a good group can become, how connected, and special, and, yes, loving.

So when someone leaves, it's sad. It's like parting with something special, like your first car or the baseball glove that saw you through high school and your one season down in the Mexican league. Only it's a person. Not a thing.
So it's worse.

There will be new people, of course. People who come along and do the work. In time, the new people will become old people, and new friendships and connections will be made. New jokes to share, new approaches to work, even new styles of work that even an old guy like myself can learn from.

That's the circle of agency life, I guess. People come and go. Stephen King wrote in "Stand by Me,"Friends come in and out of our lives like busboys in a restaurant."

That's true, I think. And more than a little sad. After all, Dunbar's Law says you can maintain about 150 friendships. No more than that. Despite what Mark Zuckerberg tells you.

But my friend who left is going on to bigger and better. She'll find new challenges and rise. She'll slay new dragons. And I'm happy for her, for that.

Maybe she'll take a little of the love we had for her with her. I'm sure she's left some love behind, that's the kind of person she was. That love is probably taped shut in a corrugated box just where she loudly left it.

As the wise one once said: and so it goes.