I’m learning how to say goodbye.
For someone who has so much, I wrote a lot about loss this year.
I wrote about loss of identity in the first weeks of the pandemic — loss of my business, loss of my kids’ rites of passage, loss of all of our normalcy.
I wrote about loss of friendships during a year of social justice evolution, during the strife of never ending political upheaval, and during my own multiple professional reinventions.
And I wrote about loss of trust and love as people continue to show us who they really are.
My friend Jackie Summers said to me early in the pandemic, “Crisis doesn’t change us, it reveals us.” I knew this to be true then, and I’ve watched it become truer each day. But it is only today that I realize that within this heartbreak, there is a gift.
Goodbyes are that gift.
They allow you to put in the rear view a habit that doesn’t build you, a practice that doesn’t grow you, a mindset that doesn’t serve you, a belief that doesn’t suit you, a friend who doesn’t see you… I mean really, really see you.
So why do we tremble at the idea of endings? Why do we cling to that which we know we should banish? Why do we hesitate when we know that we should act?
What if goodbye was a gift?
Because we are scared, because we are uncertain, because we are creatures of habit, because we think our self-worth is determined by others (who, if we were being really honest, we know haven’t done enough to earn this power over us), because we think we’re not ready, because we don’t feel worthy of more, because we don’t know how to fill the void, because we don’t yet know what the other choice holds, because success is never certain.
I could go on.
But the reasons don’t matter.
You can’t hold two competing ideas in your head at once. You certainly can’t act on both at the same time. And this is where the gift of goodbye reveals itself.
It allows you to move forward, whether boldly or meekly, into the uncertainty and figure it out as you muddle your way through. Because, shhh, here’s a secret: we’re all muddling our way through. Really, every single one of us.
I could eat fewer Christmas cookies without having a twelve point diet regimen outlined on laminated papers. I could sit less without a plan of specifically how I would move more. I could stop reading the social media posts of friends who upset me without filling my feed with undiscovered, but most certainly perfect, people. I could watch less news without substituting something life-giving blaring from my already overused screen.
I could stop saying “yes” simply because I’m afraid to be alone with my “no.”
We are so overwhelmed with get rich quick, get thin fast reinvention schemes that we’ve fallen for the biggest lie of all: that we are one decision away from a whole new life.
But what if the decision we have to make is not leaping to the next thing with which to busy ourselves, hoping for the promise that we secretly know won’t actually ever reveal itself, but simply just letting go of the current thing that isn’t working?
What if we sat in the uncertainty and the discomfort and the open space and just let us climb all over us until we learned the lesson it has to teach?
What if we allowed crisis to reveal who we are, what we need, what’s serving us and what’s not?
What if we said goodbye?
