Saying Goodbye: Learning To Do Without Having To Do Anything

It is over. Real life is not a happy love movie that the whole world is talking about, nor is it that book where relationships are forever: eternal love, inseparable friendships, families that stick together through thick and thin… In real life, love is in all its facets not always enough and saying hello often plays an important role in the plot.

The hard part about saying goodbye is knowing there’s no room for a possible reunion; all that is left are empty spaces between two or more people. Sometimes having to say hello is just one of the facts of life. The difficult thing about saying goodbye is not saying goodbye itself, but rather that because of this you have to learn to do without something and still move on with your life.

Letting go

We’ve all probably heard several times that life is like a roller coaster and that we have to adapt to the highs and lows that come with the ride. Often, on the other hand, we are also convinced that a happy life is a life where things are forever.

This contradiction can be very harmful. We feel vulnerable when we find out that our truth is constantly changing, that happiness is not constant at all and that sooner or later we will have to lose in order to win again.

The people who come can also go again. Just like when we come ourselves, we can also leave. And when these people or ourselves go away, only what they have taught us or what we have taught them remains, whatever lessons these were. We must learn to let go of what is no longer there, accept the situation and continue to live with the part they left us, the part that makes us who we are.

Everything that means saying hello

Saying goodbye is one of the most difficult times we have to go through in our lives, as there are a lot of things involved that cause us to become alienated from ourselves and lose ourselves. Saying goodbye means letting go of something that we don’t want to let go and that we want to keep with us.

Saying goodbye means wanting to say something you can’t say and have never said before, wanting to do something you’ve never been able to do with anyone, hugging things you’ve never hugged before. Saying goodbye means experiencing everything you were never able to experience before and what you will miss forever.

In the face of this situation, all that remains is the strength, sacrifice and courage that we all possess, even if we can’t believe it yet. We are able to see the future, no matter how dark it may be, and we are brave enough to face our pain. This is the only way that life will know that we are ready to be happy again.

By learning to say hello we can grow

Sometimes we don’t even have enough time to say hello. It’s part of life that people we love dearly sometimes have to leave us, even if they still stay with us. In other cases, we say goodbye without realizing it. As Jorge Bucay would say,  “No one is more likely to believe something that is not true than the person who wants the lie to be true.”

The difficult thing about saying goodbye, as we mentioned at the beginning of this article, is learning to see yourself happy again after this goodbye. Once we are able to do this, we have completely gone through a slow inner healing process, looking for what we were, want and can be for ourselves.

Saying goodbye really only comes when we look back on our past with this person and see how much we have grown thanks to him/her. We have grown because everything we went through before this goodbye was good. We have grown because this person broke us and we were able to put ourselves back together again. We have grown because we realize that life only makes sense if we continue to live it.