Say goodbye….

I’ve had a few big goodbye’s in the last while. Goodbye’s to my worldly beloved things, an amazingly fancy home, an amazing fancy two door coupe, an amazing fireplace (yep I miss that especially now as we enter winter). I’ve also said goodbye to some important people as well, my lifelong friend, some close friends, my idea of a family due to my divorce and lastly my father. This all has occurred in the last two years. Most of these goodbye’s where not fully in my control. What was in my control was how I handled them.

The Beatles had the right idea in 1967, with Hello, Goodbye. With every goodbye we find a hello. With every door that is closed another opens, so why don’t we just ‘ kiss and say goodbye’ like the Manhattans asked, more often?

Well saying goodbye is probably one of the hardest emotional acts that we humans need to act out. The finality of the act is dreadful. Having lost someone I love through both death and also by choice, I have found that it is even more difficult to accept the goodbye and mourn the loss when the person is still alive.

I think the only way to say goodbye is to resolve to take the goodness of that person, life event or chapter with you along into your new journey. Sometimes you are closing a chapter, sometimes it’s the entire book and starting a new one. Whatever is your situation, remember those you say goodbye to, live within you, and what is awesome is you get to choose to keep the best version of those people and events and help them influence your ‘hello’ (hence the Lion King reference in the picture).

I find myself in the midst of change again, being retrenched by my organization and so to bring it back to the current musical era, Chris Brown said ‘there’s never a right time to say goodbye’. All we have to do is choose how we are entering the newly opened shiny door saying hello.