Leave

“If you think about it, it’ll be over in no time, and that’s life.”

Every single time you leave a place, a moment, a person, you are leaving a memory that you will never be able to return to.

You become sad when it’s time to leave. Rather than focusing on all the good memories you had in that moment, you reflect on the idea that you are leaving them behind.

EVERYTHING HAS TO BE LEFT BEHIND AT SOME POINT.

You will never be able to hold on to something forever.

At some point in time, you will leave everything behind.

I used to get sad when it was time to leave. I was overcome by the fact that all that just happened was coming to an end. I thought that because that moment was ending, the world was coming to an end. I would constantly try to recreate that memory in my mind and would become obsessed with certain moments from my past. I would get sad for no reason just thinking about them.

That was essentially how I lived my life for the longest time.

Nothing in the present mattered because the past was gone.

Living like that made me more than just a nostalgic person, it made me an extremely sad and negative person.

Nobody wants to be around someone who is always sad that the past is gone. That kind of person kills the enjoyment of every single person they come across.

I didn’t want to be that person anymore.

I can’t pinpoint when the change came, but I specifically remember somebody telling me that I was a negative person. In my head, I wasn’t a negative person. I asked what made me negative and they responded,

“You are always living in the past. You get so caught up in how it used to be that you miss out on what is going on currently.”

It was true.

I dwelled on memories too much to be a happy person.

HAPPINESS COMES FROM APPRECIATING WHERE YOU ARE.

I reflected on my own life to that point. I thought about all the times I’d get sad that I had to leave or somebody else had to leave. Every time after somebody left, everything would always be okay. Everything would be fine, if not better than it had been before.

I realized I had to stop seeing leaving as a door closing and more as a new door opening.

That is when I started to think of my life as a book.

Every chapter that has been written to this point has been written. You can go back and read it as many times as you want, but you can’t rewrite it. Rather than being mad or sad you can’t rewrite it, keep writing new chapters.

I have realized that some characters are only in the first few chapters then their appearances become few and far between, and that’s fine.

New people are always being introduced in the next chapters and you never quite know who they might be.

By changing the lens through which I saw life, I was able to completely change my feelings about people leaving.

NOTHING WILL EVER STAY THE SAME.

We live in a dynamic world where the planet spins and people grow old.

It is impossible to be frozen in time.

The best way to try to enjoy that moment the most is to quit thinking about time outside that moment.

THE MORE YOU THINK ABOUT TIME, THE LESS YOU APPRECIATE IT.

I started just taking things for how they are.

When I try to control time, an uncontrollable wonder of the world, I become stressed and confused.

I have no power over time, all I can do is simply adjust my own life to it.

So that’s how I’ll choose to live.

At some point, I will leave and so will you.

I will bring nothing besides all the memories I have made, and I might potentially not even bring those. So rather than stressing about all those unnecessary things, I will simply just live.

***

Thank you for reading!

My goal is to inspire self-improvement in others through my personal stories and experiences.

This is The Exploration.