Closing Cycles

I got this from one of my email groups. I thought I should keep it - not because I have a problem closing chapters of my life that need to be closed, my ritual haircuts are a testimony to that. But I have other lessons to learn when you live with another's chapters and stories past, and memorabilias kept--- It is foolish - and yet they pain you just the same.

Closing Cycles
By 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 will be finishing chapters, turning over new
leaves, getting on with life, and they will all feel
bad seeing you at a standstill. None of us can be in
the present and the past at the same time, not
even
when we try to understand the things that happen
to
us. What has passed will not return: we
cannot forever be children, late adolescents, sons
that feel guilt or rancor towards our parents, lovers
who day and night relive an affair with someone who
has gone away and has not the least intention of
coming back.

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 maybe!) 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, and shake off the dust. Stop being who you
were, and change into who you are.