I dedicate this piece to my sister, because while she is going far away and I will probably not see her for a long time, I am so immensely proud of her and excited to see the kind of life she builds for herself.
The full title to this monologue today is “goodbyes are just as important as the rest of your life”, and I’ve decided on that bold statement because not only does it perfectly showcase the point I’m trying to make, but it also flies in the face of the things we all subconsciously believe from time to time.
If you’re going to live a long and happy life, you’re going to see that over time, you’ll see all different kinds of days. Days when nothing makes sense, days when you think you’ve got everything down, and all sorts of phases in between. And as you reflect on your life, I bet you can already see it.
There are times when one of our roles takes precedence over the others, and periods when we recreate ourselves from the bottom up. And it’s these times that really create wisdom and grace. It’s these times that lend themselves to your becoming a better person, and one who learns to move through time rolling with the punches.
In fact, these things that we call “defining moments” are almost always the end of something, which turns into the beginning of something else. Those goodbyes that hurt us so much are the same ones that lead us, hook, line and sinker, to our destiny.
Getting to a goodbye
Usually, things don’t end overnight. You settle into a new routine, maybe you even like it. You get comfortable and start streamlining it for efficiency. Then after a while, stagnancy starts to set in. Things just seem to come to a grinding halt. Maybe you even start to get frustrated and desperate, as your expectations form a bigger and bigger gap with your experience.
And you can only be unhappy for so long before you realize something has to change, right? A lot of times, we let all the little feelings and thoughts pile up before we even realize what we want to do with them. When this happens, this emotional clutter, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed.
It’s important to be honest with yourself when you’re starting to get dissatisfied with a substantial part of your life. Not just so the end isn’t so jarring, but maybe something smaller can be altered to bring you back to inner peace and purpose. You know, something short of a completely new beginning.
And then there’s another way of getting to the end, which is by planning it all out in the first place. Often, the knowledge of an impending finality to a situation is enough to bring on a bit of distress. After all, even if you planned this chapter in your life to close out, there’s no way of predicting what the next one will hold for you.
Inhabiting a new world
You have to learn to trust yourself. Maybe you have always known how to make the best of the situation you’re in or maybe you haven’t, but you can learn how to flow with life. The key is to really embrace what’s actually in front of you as your options. When you don’t compare your current state to things that don’t actually exist for you as options, it’s hard to feel defeated or out of place.
What do I mean by this? Well, as much pain as you may feel from ending what may have been a very happy period of your life, try to not look back if at all possible. Instead, look forward at the possibilities unfolding ahead of you. You can never get back to the life you’ve already lived, but you can create amazing experiences in the future. Experiences of excitement and fun and flow and creativity— if you are willing to live in the moment and have fun with what is really there.
When you fully embody this knowledge and live it, you will realize that you cannot actually be homesick or missing something from your past. What you really are is dissatisfied and ignoring the options that you have in front of you. You have every ability to create a pleasant and soul-feeding life right where you’re at, I promise you. Wherever you go, there you are. This has a melancholy meaning, as well as the more positive one, because even when you leave everything behind, you can still access those concepts and ideas that make you beam with happiness and pride.
You can’t run away from your problems
As I said, wherever you go, there you are. And that’s a big reason why I’m such a proponent of doing the inner work necessary to be able to sit comfortably with yourself in silence. If you don’t learn to love yourself, you’re going to have a really tough time building the life and self that you want to have.
But not only that, our other troubles have a way of following us around as well. I had a friend once who wasn’t Mormon and moved from Utah, which has a big Mormon population. Even though the Mormon population in our city was very close to none (in fact, I have never met one in real life), he couldn’t stop talking about Mormonism and how messed up it was and how much he was against it. Nobody argued with him about it once. In fact, to us, the issue wasn’t even real.
The sad part was, even though he was far away from the issue, he was still in pain. How many of us have been the same way? We thought we could run away from our hurt and our inner wounds, but they follow us around anyway. That’s because they don’t belong to the person who inflicted them, they belong to us, for as long as we keep them.
So don’t run away expecting to be able to outrun your problems. Instead, get out if you’re unsafe, and regardless of whether you leave or not, address your emotional plights. Don’t let them fester or freeze, but rather, care for these wounds in order to heal them and create an actual new life. (If you need help with this, or convincing that it’s a good approach, you can read how to create a safe space to feel in, and why on earth would I want to feel my feelings, respectively.)
So, you’re ready for something new?
When we say goodbye to something, we’re saying hello to something else. And in fact, in order to say hello to anything, we need to say goodbye to something else. It’s the sort of duality between the yes and no of priorities that can make life so messy at times.
When you learn that everything in life is about priorities, you hold the key to everything you’ve ever hoped to be, do, or have. As it turns out, you can have it all. Just not right now. And as life flows into itself, you learn that every hello is a goodbye in disguise. The little extra work that introspection takes pays huge dividends, if you do it right.
When you finish something up, you have to understand that something else is going to take its’ place, whether you like it or not. It’s up to you to behave intentionally in order to put something specific in the empty space.
You can take control of your life!
Sometimes life changes are thrust upon us and we have to roll with the punches. It’s true. But sometimes you know that you have a choice to make, and yet still hesitate. In fact, people put off decisions, important decisions, for days, years even if they can get away with it. Why? Because they’re scared.
Change can be scary. The unknown has all sorts of things lurking in it—some beautiful, some unsightly. And it’s also true that there’s no guarantee you can avoid the roadblocks and setbacks and nightmares. In giving things up, you can’t be 100% sure if the new thing you’re embracing.
If you let this fear rule you, however, you’ll never experience all the lovely things a new life chapter has to offer you. You’ll find yourself not living the exciting, sparkly life that you know deep down inside you want. Even worse, you’ll find that the charms of this life chapter dwindle away as you wear out your welcome in one life phase.
You see, life is a little bit like a book or a story. Maybe you’re reading and you’re really loving this one part, so you stop to reread it over and over again. Eventually, the same words and sentences are really going to lose their punch. You need the continual evolution of a story to make it compelling, and when you lose that in your life, it’s equally disastrous.
How to know
All of us have an inner pull. Some may call it intuition or connection with a higher power or others, simply feelings, but we have a way of knowing deep down inside what is right for us.
If you’ve had a lovely experience living somewhere or being a part of a collective, but now you’re finding it draining and a shell of what you used to experience, then it’s likely that it’s time to move on to a more compelling idea.
It actually isn’t that hard to hear this sentiment in yourself. When you start thinking thoughts like “this isn’t fun anymore” or dreading things you used to enjoy and objectively think are good, then it’s time to move on. You know it.
The hard part is actually following through with this understanding to its full and mature conclusion. In other words, you can know with your heart that you need to move on, but ultimately you need to be brave and do it. Take your leap of faith.
I’m not saying to ignore possible outcomes or not bother preparing. However, it’s important to realize that conditions will never be perfect. If you try and wait until they are, you’ll find yourself wasting your life.
Our aversion to goodbyes
We all get so excited at new beginnings like spring and babies and weddings and new jobs, but we tend to sell our goodbyes short, even avoiding them altogether. And let’s be honest for a second, goodbyes can really hurt. You spend so much time and effort building something up, whether it is a relationship or a career or a home, that it is painful to think about the impermanence of it all. But don’t get stuck there.
The fact is, time is a river, continually freely flowing. And into it, we interject our lives. Our lives are these cyclical things, that roll into hellos and goodbyes on a whim. And as we play through our cycles, time takes us with it, evolving us through trials and troubles, to new and exciting places.
So goodbyes aren’t just the lifeless husk of a cadaver, they’re the evolution of something new in our lives, just as much as the first bud of spring. We need to shed the old in order to embrace the new, and ultimately, this brings us to a new and improved relationship with ourselves—the base of your whole reality.
And it’s okay that goodbyes hurt sometimes. That pain is what shows us that we had something good. When we let go of something that was really lovely, it’s bound to sting a little bit. It’s almost like the more sad a goodbye makes you, the more you know you’ll always have your memories with you, and the better mark something has made on you and your life.
Let yourself and your life be remade. Let go of your past and all the things that aren’t serving you now, with the bravery that self confidence brings and the assurance that with trust and hard work, your destiny will find you. Your beautiful crazy new life awaits you.
