The hardest thing that I have done so far is to begin to learn to let go. Let go of the notion that time can stop for more than a moment, ease away the idea that perhaps the relationships that we have will stay in the form we desire forever. It’s a funny feeling, knowing when some of our friendships are slipping, beginning to lay fallow from neglect or distraction, from pain and argument, or even worse, simply from the withering facet of the unceasing march of time; unable to stop the awful snowball of dissolution as it gains speed and size down the slope of our personal lives.
At times like this it seems that life can be boiled down to little more than various roads diverging in the wood. With each new decision we have to face, we are confronted also with which path to begin walking down. The misfortune is that all those we hold as dear friends also have to make those same decisions as we do (at least they come to the same crossroads). The sadness in all of this is that being their own people, those who we care about, as they make their decisions, very easily become obscured by the forest which hides us from one another.
I wish I could stop this process. I wish I could call out (without metaphor, but I’ll take what I can get) a halt to my dear friend; a call that rings out in the forest of our lives for pause, perhaps even for return. I want to somehow convey to this obscure figure through the trees my appreciation of all that they are, of all that we could be. I want to shout to all those who can hear the adoration with which I hold the times we have spent; to frighten the birds from their boughs with the boom of my exclamation of just how dear they are to both myself and the world. I want to raise the heads of other travelers with the sound of this person, to let them know as I do that he/she is capable of anything in this world, given the opportunity. But most of all, I want them to know that this is coming from me, and I mean what I say.
I’ve never been a believer in impossibility. Anything that has seemed unattainable to others to me has seemed only a more worthy goal requiring more effort. What I never stopped to consider was the idea that perhaps other minds were more dearly attached to the notion of impossibility that I was in infinite possibility, and now that I look back, there has been a long line of people who have told me that I couldn’t succeed. All of them I proved wrong, all but a couple select individuals in my life. And what do I remember? Of course I can bring to mind all of the success that I have had which flew in the face of disbelievers, but what readily comes to mind are the times when I have been run again the spectacularly painful wall of failure.
And the trouble is, it is in perception alone where failure arises. I firmly believe that we can only fail when we come away from a situation knowing that there was something else to be done; that we gave up before we truly exhausted all of our options. At times though, we are not the only ones who make the decisions: especially in relationships, be they platonic or romantic, we also have to consider the notion of another mind at work in decision making. No matter how well we think out our actions, thoughts and decisions, we are still subject to the agreement of another to make our thoughts reality.
And it is in these moments that I have learned so painfully to let go. Regardless of my calls out, irrespective of my cries of understanding, sometimes our friends and loved ones simply don’t/cannot/refuse to hear what we are trying to say, and it is too easy to blame ourselves. What could I have done differently? If only I had said instead…
I could have said anything, that wouldn’t have changed a thing. The ways to disparage ourselves is endless, but we can only do so much. In fact, we can only do what we know and are capable of. That is the essence, I believe, of letting go. The knowledge that we have done all we can, and must now leave it up to fate and the perceptual abilities of our long lost (and possibly soon found) relationships. Yes, it will be horribly painful to watch what was once intimate and pure devolve in acquaintance or worse. Of course it is agonizing to know that we might be blamed for things we haven’t done, or even worse, for the things that we have. Although we can always carry the good times we have had with another with us, yet there is and may always be a nagging voice in the background wondering what went wrong. That voice has a point, yet if we are the ones wondering I now believe that answer cannot be found by us at all: if we are to know we will find out when the our lost friend is good and ready.
I have a particular person in mind here; through I refuse to name names (I think the party involved knows however). Suffice to say that we can only feel real loss when we lose something that we value more than ourselves, and this person was the one of the greatest occasions to ever happen to me, person, place or thing and I appreciate that with every fiber of my being. Words cannot describe how dear you will always be to me. I have to let you go now, for I don’t think you can see me for what I am, only for what you think me to be. Good luck though, and I’ll always be here if you ever need, but for both your good and mine, it might be time to fly solo. Fare thee well.
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