Response to Closing Cycles...

Liz shared an article by Paolo Cuelho and I just had to send a reply.

Here is the article:

CLOSING CYCLES...

by Paolo Coelho

One always has to know when a stage comes to an end.  If we insist on staying longer than the necessary time, we lose the happiness and the meaning of the other stages we have to go through.  Closing cycles, shutting doors, ending chapters - whatever name we give it, what matters is to leave in the past the moments of life that have finished.

Did you lose your job?  Had a loving relationship come to an end?  Did you leave your parents' house?  Gone to live abroad?  Had a long-lasting friendship end all of a sudden?  You can spend a long time wondering why this has happened.  You can tell yourself you won't take another step until you find out why certain things that were so important and so solid in your life have turned into dust, just like that.  But such an attitude will be awfully stressing for everyone involved: your parents, your husband or wife, your friends, your children, your sister, everyone will be finishing chapters, turning over new leaves, getting on with life, and they will all feel bad seeing you at a standstill.

None of us can be in the present and the past at the same time, not even when we try to understand the things that happen to us.  What has passed will not return: we cannot forever be children, late adolescents, sons that feel guilt or rancor towards our parents,lovers who day and night relive an affair with someone who has gone away and has not the least intention of coming back.  Things pass, and the best we can do is to let them really go away.

That is why it is so important (however painful it may be!) to destroy souvenirs, move, give lots of things away to orphanages, sell or donate the books you have at home.  Everything in this visible world is a manifestation of the invisible world, of what is going on in our hearts - and getting rid of certain memories also means making some room for other memories to take their place.  Let things go.  Release them.  Detach yourself from them.

Nobody plays this life with marked cards, so sometimes we win and sometimes we lose.  Do not expect anything in return, do not expect your efforts to be appreciated, your genius to be discovered, your love to be understood.  Stop turning on your emotional television to watch the same program over and over again, the one that shows how much you suffered from a certain loss: that is only poisoning you, nothing else.

Nothing is more dangerous than not accepting love relationships that are broken off, work that is promised but there is no starting date, decisions that are always put off waiting for the "ideal moment."

Before a new chapter is begun, the old one has to be finished: tell yourself that what has passed will never come back.  Remember that there was a time when you could live without that thing or that person - nothing is irreplaceable, a habit is not a need.  This may sound so obvious, it may even be difficult, but it is very important.

Closing cycles.  Not because of pride, incapacity or arrogance, but simply because that no longer fits your life. Shut the door, change the record, clean the house, shake off the dust.  Stop being who you were, and change into who you are...

And here is my reply:

In a message dated 8/20/2007 5:33:55 P.M. Taipei Standard Time, Peralta AU writes:

That is why it is so important (however painful it may be!) to destroy souvenirs, move, give lots of things away to orphanages, sell or donate the books you have at home.  Everything in this visible world is a manifestation of the invisible world, of what is going on in our hearts - and getting rid of certain memories also means making some room for other memories to take their place.  Let things go.  Release them.  Detach yourself from them.

First of all, please continue sharing everything inspirational that you come across with, I am reading most of them, promise

This is a good piece on letting go, growing up, moving on.

But I will have to disagree on Mr. Cuelho's advice that we destroy anything that will remind us of a chapter in our life that we wish to close, donating books, giving your DVD, VCD, cassette tapes to your friends (kung agree ka, akin na lang iyong mga DVD mo, hehehe), and detaching yourself from what was dear to you that you have somehow lost.

Why?

For me kasi, each chapter in our lives does not actually end, it gets stored, ready to be retrieved if needed.

Its not as if we are trying to stunt our growth, not wanting to move on, but the hurt that we have felt will somehow be of use when the time comes.

It sounds crazy pero this is how I feel.

As an example, has it ever happened to you that you feel sad and you do not know why? Some say its a has something to do with our body, parang its pathological. They say that everyone will battle some form of depression once in their lifetime.

I battled my own demons a few years and this was a time when I wrote poems and short stories. I still have my poems and some stories with me and reading at them now, they are bad, hehehe.

I have not written anything for a long time and I missed those days na I was writing, its my therapy, my outlet. I will sometimes browse through my notebooks, and yes, the hurt comes back, but I only laugh at it, always asking myself did that really happened to me? Remembering the hurt helps me growth, help me cope up with some of the things that I need to endure.

Destroy my poems? Parang hindi ko magawa, kahit na hindi ko sila ma take.

So is it CLOSING CYCLES? For me, its more of STORING CYCLES.