Closing Cycles
Closing Cycles
One always has to know when a stage comes to an end.
If we insist on staying longer than the necessary time, we lose the happiness
and the meaning of the other stages we have to go through.
Closing cycles, shutting doors, ending chapters - whatever name we give it,
what matters is to leave in the past the moments of life that have finished.
Did you lose your job? Has a loving relationship come to an end?
Did you leave your parents' house? Gone to live abroad?
Has a long-lasting friendship ended all of a sudden? You can spend a long time
wondering why this has happened.
You can tell yourself you won't take another step until you find out why
certain things that were so important and so solid in your life have turned
into dust, just like that.
But such an attitude will be awfully stressing for everyone involved: your
parents, your husband or wife, your friends, your children, your sister,
everyone will be finishing chapters, turning over new leaves, getting on with
life, and they will all feel bad seeing you at a standstill.
None of us can be in the present and the past at the same time, not even when
we try to understand the things that happen to us.
What has passed will not return: we cannot for ever be children, late
adolescents, sons that feel guilt or rancor towards our parents, lovers who day
and night relive an affair with someone who has gone away and has not the least
intention of coming back. Things pass, and the best we can do is to let them
really go away.
That is why it is so important (however painful it may be) to destroy
souvenirs, move, give lots of things away to orphanages, sell or donate the
books you have at home. Everything in this visible world is a manifestation of
the invisible world, of what is going on in our hearts and getting rid of
certain memories also means making some room for other memories to take their
place.
Let things go.
Release them.
Detach yourself from them.
Nobody plays this life with marked cards, so sometimes we win and sometimes we
lose.
Do not expect anything in return, do not expect your efforts to be appreciated,
your genius to be discovered, your love to be understood.
Stop turning on your emotional television to watch the same program over and
over again, the one that shows how much you suffered from a certain loss: that
is only poisoning you, nothing else.
Nothing is more dangerous than not accepting love relationships that are broken
off, work that is promised but there is no starting date, decisions that are
always put off waiting for the "ideal moment."
Before a new chapter is begun, the old one has to be finished: tell yourself
that what has passed will never come back.
Remember that there was a time when you could live without that thing or that
person - nothing is irreplaceable, a habit is not a need. This may sound so
obvious, it may even be difficult, but it is very important.
Closing cycles.
Not because of pride, incapacity or arrogance, but simply because that no
longer fits your life. Shut the door, change the record, clean the house, shake
off the dust.
Stop being who you WERE, and change into who you ARE
