Every now and then in our life, we meet people who turn out to be very important to us, so much so that we feel like life would be impossible to live any further without their continuous presence in it. This person can be a best friend, or someone a little more special than that. This person begins to feel like the whole and sole of our existence. We tend to feel, “This is it! This is going to last forever! How lucky I am!”. This does last for a while, and if we are truly lucky, maybe forever. However, more often than not, that person feels the need to leave. “Things seem to be moving too fast”, “I can’t handle it”, “I need space”, “we need to take a break”, these are the few standard parting lines.
All of the above had happened to me. The person whom I cared for more than myself had left. That person might return, might not. The questions that arose in my mind were typical: “Why me? Did I do something wrong? How did I not see this coming? Did I ignore the signs? What will I do now?”. My life was in dumps. Every day, I would wake up in the hope of that person making a contact with me. I would plaster a happy-go-lucky smile on my face, slowly dying from within. I resorted to the only anti-depressant I had at hand- my books.
This mode of self-pity and despair lasted for a while until I had this epiphany: The reason a person leaves is because the role that person was suppose to play in your life is over. You do not need that person in your life anymore. God has made that decision for you. Every person who enters your life has a role, a very specific one at that, to play in your life. And once that is done, that person ahs to leave. Nothing you do can prevent that. Because it has already been decided by a larger Force.
The old has to go to make way for the new. Things have to change for a person to evolve. But we are so caught up in our comfort-zone that we become too much of a coward at the thought of leaving it. So we keep clinging to what we know as familiar, no matter how much of a fool we make out of ourselves by doing so. In the end, the more we cling, the more we are delaying the process of change, the farther we are pushing ourselves from what awaits us in the future.
As the old saying goes, “The reason we lose something wonderful is because something even better awaits us in the future”. It is upto us to let go of the past and reach out to the future. It will hurt, a lot, but when we find that “Something Better” it will all be worth it in the end!
