by Paulo Coelho
[Several times I've received via Internet some texts attributed to me, which I did not write, as the text below. I made several changes and decided to post it here. - Paulo 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? Has a loving relationship come to an end? Did you leave your parents’ house? Gone to live abroad? Has a long-lasting friendship ended 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 is finishing chapters, turning over new leaves, getting on with life, and they will all feel bad seeing you at a standstill.
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."
"The Clean Break"
by Alex Noble
"The clean break is best. There is less bleeding,
and no long journey through accusations and regret.
The clean break does not admit failure. No.
It simply says that one has finished one’s work with this or that,
that one now must leave and let other forces and influences take over,
for good or ill.
One does not continue to maintain a sense of ‘trying to make things work,’
or ‘putting the pieces of what is broken back together again.’
One simply shuts the door.
As the Friend puts it: “You shut the little door to your heart.”
The clean break looks for the blessing, the gift,
no matter how painful the whole thing feels.
You do not look back. You focus on the horizon.
You remember Lot’s wife, who looked back, that fatal over the shoulder look,
just one last glance, and turned to salt. And Eurydice too. No.
You move quickly. You are breaking free.
The clean break says: “That was then, and knowing what I know, this is now:
the epiphany is not lost on me. I embrace it.
I am somehow better, though not without pain.”
But you know the pain will pass, and that there will be light,
the light of wisdom and love.
It is love that will comfort you,
and will lead you beside the still waters, and restore your soul.
The clean break lets things be as they will be,
does not make excuses, does not wish for change,
but embraces reality and truth. Things will not change.
The clean break is what happens to the butterfly,
when it struggles out of the cocoon, leaves that imprisoning past,
and becomes a new creature with strong wings,
who sees only the great sky, and feels the lifting wind, the wind, only the wind.
How much there is to see, and discover in this new life,
this new body, the wide sky, the joy of flight, at last.”
From: "SOUL POEMS"
http://www.alexnoble.typepad.com/soulpoems
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