The Weight of Temporary Joy: On Mourning Moments Before They End
On day two of our honeymoon, I was already nostalgic for day one.
Sitting on the beach in Cox’s Bazar, watching Happy collect shells, I felt the strange sadness of knowing this moment would become a memory. The future tense of missing something while it’s still happening—this is travel’s cruelest trick. Not the jet lag, not the disorientation, but this peculiar emotional displacement where you’re simultaneously present and already looking back, experiencing the moment while simultaneously grieving its loss.
The sensation has a name in other languages—the Portuguese “saudade,” the Welsh “hiraeth”—but English lacks a single word for this preemptive nostalgia, this mourning of the living present. Perhaps our language’s silence on this reflects our cultural discomfort with it, our insistence that we should simply “be present” without acknowledging how difficult presence becomes when we’re acutely aware of impermanence.
Why do we start grieving experiences before they end?
The question haunts every meaningful journey. We should be purely immersed—in the salt air, the sound of waves, the simple beauty of someone we love discovering small wonders on a beach. Instead, we’re split: part of us inhabits the moment while another part has already fast-forwarded to the future where this exists only as memory, photograph, story told to friends who ask “how was the honeymoon?”
Maybe because we know they’re temporary. At home, we assume tomorrow will be similar to today. The same kitchen, the same morning routine, the same route to work. This assumed continuity lets us relax into the present without constantly calculating its remaining duration. We take for granted that what exists now will exist tomorrow, next week, next month. This is an illusion, of course—nothing is permanent—but it’s a useful illusion that permits something resembling presence.
But travel has built-in expiration dates. Every sunrise in a new place carries the weight of its own ending. The hotel checkout is scheduled, the return flight is booked, the vacation days are numbered. We know exactly how much time remains, and this knowledge contaminates the experience. Each beautiful moment becomes freighted with the awareness that we have only five more days, then four, then three to feel this particular quality of light, to hear this specific accent of waves, to exist in this temporary escape from ordinary life.
The countdown begins the moment we arrive. Day one feels expansive—the whole trip stretches ahead. But by day two, we’ve already begun calculating loss. Half the honeymoon is gone. Two-thirds remains. The mathematics of depletion runs constantly in the background, turning each moment into a kind of spending, each hour into something used up and therefore mourned.
I spent more time photographing that beach than experiencing it, trying to preserve what I was already losing just by being conscious that it would end. The camera became a talisman against forgetting, each photo a desperate attempt to hold onto something I knew was already slipping away. But what was I actually capturing? The view Happy saw? The feeling of sand between my toes? The particular quality of happiness that exists only in those early days of marriage when everything still feels imbued with ceremony and promise?
Photographs preserve appearances but not experiences. They save the visual data while the sensory richness—the smell of salt and sunscreen, the precise temperature of the breeze, the way Happy’s laughter sounded against the backdrop of waves—all this escapes the frame. We return home with hundreds of images that supposedly represent the trip, but they’re more like evidence that we were there than actual preservation of what being there felt like.
The paradox of presence: the more aware we become of the preciousness of a moment, the less present we are in it. Recognizing something as special immediately removes us from unself-conscious participation. The moment we think “I want to remember this forever,” we’ve already stepped outside it, already begun the work of converting living experience into future memory. We become our own documentary filmmakers, narrating our lives as they happen, and in doing so, watching them rather than inhabiting them.
This is different from the ordinary flow state where we lose ourselves in activity. When Happy was collecting shells, she was purely absorbed—hunting for unbroken spirals, examining colors, delighting in unexpected finds. She was in the moment because she wasn’t thinking about the moment. Meanwhile, I was thinking about how I would remember her collecting shells, what this scene would mean when recalled years later, how I might describe it to our future children or write about it someday. I was already practicing the memory while the moment itself was still occurring.
There’s something almost violent in this—the way consciousness can kill spontaneity, how awareness of beauty can prevent actual absorption in it. The most transcendent experiences often happen when we’re not trying to have transcendent experiences, when we’re not monitoring our emotions or curating impressions or preparing mental narratives. They happen in unguarded moments we’re not attempting to preserve or optimize or extract maximum value from.
But travel encourages exactly this kind of extractive mindset. We’ve paid money, taken time off work, made elaborate plans. There’s pressure to “make the most of it,” to ensure the experience justifies the investment. Every moment must be meaningful, every day must be memorable, every experience must be worth the cost. This transforms leisure into a kind of desperate productivity—we must accumulate enough good memories to sustain us through the ordinary months ahead.
The irony is that this pressure to extract maximum value from experiences often prevents us from actually valuing them. We’re so busy ensuring moments are properly photographed, checked off bucket lists, and converted into social media content that we never simply allow them to exist. We treat experiences like natural resources to be mined rather than environments to inhabit.
What if the most beautiful journeys are the ones we’re brave enough to experience without mourning them while they happen?
This requires a different kind of courage than we usually associate with travel—not the bravery of adventure or risk-taking, but the courage to trust that what’s happening now is enough, that we don’t need to prematurely memorialize it, that presence itself is more valuable than any preservation of presence we might achieve.
It means accepting that much of the trip will be forgotten. That most moments won’t be photographed. That the overwhelming majority of our time in any place will leave no permanent record except perhaps in the unconscious accumulation of experience that shapes us in ways we can’t track or measure. This feels like waste in our documentation-obsessed culture, but perhaps it’s actually freedom—the freedom to have experiences that exist only for themselves, that don’t need to be justified or shared or converted into content.
It also means accepting impermanence not as tragedy but as the very condition that makes beauty possible. If the honeymoon lasted forever, it wouldn’t be a honeymoon—it would be life, and we’d find it as ordinary as anything else. The temporary nature of travel isn’t what ruins it; it’s what gives it meaning. The sunset is beautiful partly because it only lasts an hour. The vacation is precious partly because it ends. The moment with Happy on the beach matters because it can’t be repeated exactly, because even if we return to that beach, we won’t be the same people, won’t have the same honeymoon innocence, won’t experience it with the same freshness.
Perhaps the question isn’t how to stop mourning experiences while they happen, but how to mourn them differently—with gratitude rather than grasping, with appreciation rather than anxiety. To feel the bittersweetness of impermanence not as a call to frantic preservation but as an invitation to notice what’s here now, in whatever form it takes, for however long it lasts.
The next day, day three, I tried an experiment. I left my camera in the hotel. I told myself I would simply be on the beach with Happy, without documentation, without the mental work of converting experience into memory while it was still occurring. It was harder than I expected—my hands kept reaching for a phone that wasn’t there, my mind kept composing captions for photos I wasn’t taking. But gradually, something loosened. I noticed things I’d been too busy photographing to see: the pattern of Happy’s footprints in wet sand, the way late afternoon light made the water look impossibly turquoise, the simple contentment of sitting in silence without needing to narrate it.
Did I remember that day less clearly because I didn’t photograph it? Probably. Does it matter? I’m not sure. What I remember most isn’t the specific visual details but the feeling of having actually been there, of having given the moment my full attention rather than borrowing from it to fund some imagined future reminiscence.
Maybe this is what we’re really afraid of when we start grieving experiences before they end: not that we’ll forget them, but that we’ll have to let them go. That we can’t possess our best moments any more than we can possess time itself. That happiness is not something we can capture and keep, but something that moves through us and moves on, leaving us changed but empty-handed.
The honeymoon ended, as honeymoons do. We returned home to our ordinary life, which was also beautiful in its way, though it took months to recognize this because we were too busy missing Cox’s Bazar. Eventually, the nostalgia faded. Eventually, the photos stopped feeling like treasures and started feeling like any other digital files taking up space. Eventually, we stopped talking about the honeymoon and started living the marriage.
And sometimes now, years later, I remember that beach—not from the photographs but from some deeper place where the unrecorded moments live. I remember how Happy looked when she found a perfect shell, and I wasn’t watching through a camera lens but with my actual eyes. I remember the weight of knowing it would end and the strange peace of accepting this. I remember learning, briefly, how to be somewhere without already leaving it.
That lesson didn’t last. I still photograph too much, still grieve experiences before they finish. But occasionally, in ordinary moments that carry no particular weight, I’ll notice I’m fully present—not trying to preserve or optimize or extract meaning, just existing in the flow of now. And in those unguarded moments, I understand what I was reaching for on that beach: not the ability to keep things, but the courage to let them go.
