As the saying goes(by Moira Rogers), the two hardest things to say in life are hello for the first time and goodbye for the last.
That said, saying goodbye also means looking forward to new encounters. In a few years from now, you will have new skills, a new title, a new profession or business, new customers and a different level of influence.
All of this forward ratchet requires that you celebrate less – all the things that you are not doing any longer. Things that you have left behind. Let go. Disengaged with. Walked away from. Said ‘goodbye‘ to. In a sense. Past.
To land a new job, you leave behind your old one. The adult emerges upon the child being said goodbye to.
Much as we would like to believe that growth comes with no goodbyes, but it does. It is better to reconcile to the fact that what we begin will likely come to an end. Every beginning has an ending and every ending has a new beginning. When we go into it with eyes wide open, plan for it, then we will do it better.
Even book titles go by the names like Sorrow and Bliss, by Meg Mason, which while charming and lacerating in its humor but is also studded with all these moments of small-scale tragedy that make it feel hard to breathe. The price of being awake to life is being also awake to mortality.
” Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending.” –Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
What will you leave behind? What will you embrace?
ENDS