When we're old, our lives become the sum of all whom we have loved. It is important not to waste anyone. One task of living out the last half of life is excavating and recovering all of those whom we loved the first half. Thus, the recovery of lost loves becomes an important way in which the past affects the present.
Life is not hurrying on to a receding future, nor hankering after an imagined past. It
is the turning aside like Moses to the miracle of the lit bush, to a brightness that
seemed as transitory as your youth once, but is the eternity that awaits you.