The Gift of Goodbye and the Growth in Letting Go
It’s nature.
Yet somehow, in our everyday lives as human beings, we reject this natural process. Even when we understand that growth only comes from the ending of a period, age, or phase, still we get comfortable with where we are and we tend to fight against letting go of things that we should.
Personally, although I know for a fact that I’m not the only one who has had trouble with this aspect of life, I can really only truly speak for myself when I say that learning how to let go of things so that I could grow has been one of the biggest challenges that I have ever faced. I have spent years constantly riding the learning curve of bad relationships and dead end career choices all because I allowed myself to deny the signs that it was time to let go or to say goodbye. I desperately tried to hold on thinking that love and goodness would conquer it all. It’s what I wanted to believe.
It didn’t.
And although it hurt to let go, what I soon realized later in life is that trying to hold onto a dead situation hurt me more in the long run than the immediate rejection from a breakup or a layoff ever did.
It took a while for me to mature and not to get upset with God when I would pray wondering why I had to give up something that at the moment I truly thought that I loved. But after a while of having to learn the same lessons over and over, I finally came to a point where I was willing to embrace the free flowing current of life and the changes brought on by growth and progression.
It’s true that growing pains are a real phenomenon. Once we’ve gotten too big or too advanced to be where we currently are, the place we're in begins to get very uncomfortable and we have no choice but to move to a different place or a different level that can better accommodate us.
Still, it is only when we are willing to say goodbye to where we are that we can embrace our growth and where it’s taking us.
But we must change our perspective of what it means to say goodbye. Goodbye doesn’t necessarily have to have a bad connotation...
Goodbye can simply mean, “Congratulations, you’ve completed this level in life, you may now move on to the next.”
Life is meant to be a journey full of excitement made up of highs and lows. Don’t rob yourself of the experience because of the fear of endings brought on by change or possible rejection. Stretch your wings and always be ready to embrace all that life has to offer.
A. L. Hearn