For most people, the act of saying goodbye is difficult. Not goodbye as in "I'll see you when you get back" or "I'll visit next time I'm in your part of the world," but a permanent goodbye.
Some people avoid final goodbyes altogether, leaving everything in their life in a sort of eternal limbo, even if whatever they're avoiding parting with is long overdue to be kicked to the curb.
Mrs. Denmarkguy and I have our own little strange rituals that we carry out from time to time, including a review of what we hope to accomplish during the next Moon cycle. Today happened to mark another new Moon.
I don't remember exactly why we ended up working with the Moon cycle rather than a month, although I have a vague recollection that we preferred the Moon cycle because it always is four weeks as opposed to months which have odd numbers of days.
Anyway, one of our tasks or "challenges" for this new moon cycle is to identify three things — or people or habits — that we want to say goodbye to.
Since we live in an incredibly goal-oriented society, where so much centers around acquisition and success, we often give lots of time and energy to what we want to accomplish and what we want to add to our lives and what we want to acquire. But we get very little time to considering what we want to get rid of; what we want to leave behind; what no longer serves.
Surprisingly, many people struggle to even identify what it is they should let go of in their lives, remaining largely oblivious to any negative habits or thoughts that they see as "harmless" and thus make no concerted effort to cut from their lives.
Here's a bit of a strange metaphor: it's like having a stove with five burners and you can't exactly turn on that center burner, but you also can't readily turn off that burner so it's always dodgy, but you've decided it doesn't matter because the other four burners work and you cook your food on them and you've learned to ignore that fourth burner that always stays slightly warm. You've even been warned that it could flame up unpredictably and burn your house down... but you ignore it.
So why not do something about it?
Perhaps the hardest things to let go of are people, ideas and dreams.
We often give remarkably much "storage space" in our minds to them in the form of "what could have been." Somehow, it hurts to let go of a dream of something that could have been.
I say that as somebody who once struggled to let go of a relationship that never happened but ended in 1983 while I was at University... but I didn't manage to truly let go of it till 1998. Kristin was... well... special, and we had "a thing" but we were both betrothed to other people and so we very "adultly" chose the high road and agreed that we weren't going to act on that "thing."
I feel almost ashamed to admit that it took me almost 15 years before the thoughts of what might have been stopped eating a hole in me.
Dreams and thoughts and beliefs work in a similarly insiduous way. We attach ourselves to something we always thought would happen; that we always thought we could accomplish, but as the years tick by the chances that our vision will actually come through get slimmer and slimmer. But often we keep clinging to something until we cross a threshold at which point we have to realize that it will never happen, and it's time to let go.
We like to pretend that "it's nothing" and that we're over it but the truth of the matter is that it's "a genuine loss" and it cuts just as much as an actual loss that unfolded right in front of us. In a sense, it's almost like a sort of emotional limerence that's attached to ideas rather than to an individual.
The outcome is imagined, it's not real.
Even so, perhaps we need to give ourselves permission to mourn that loss that comes with letting go.
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great remainder of your week!
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Created at 2026.02.17 23:58 PST
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