Footprint September 2007

The greatest power is the power of goodbye

When we stop to change we are dead. To grow we sometimes have to say good bye to things, places and people and we have to let go of beliefs, attitudes and habits that doesn’t serve us anymore. We have to jump without knowing where our feet will land and risk exposing everything that is true for us. To gain that which is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else. The only way to grow is to let go even when the most frightening things we can think of is to trust our intuition and follow that trusting. We must remember that it is better to be a lion for one day than a sheep all our life. We have to stop playing around and become the people we were meant to be in all of our affairs.

If we don’t make the choices ourselves someone else will make it for us. It might feel like the easier way because then we do not have to own the consequences ourselves. The only catch is that we end up cowards living a lie. We do anything to avoid the fear of making a choice and we have somehow come to believe that security and stasis are synonymous. We have so much fear about facing ourselves and confronting the choices we need to make that we are willing to wreck our lives in order not to have to make a choice. Growth is like breathing and eating, a natural and intimately part of being human. Our lives are not set in stone. Lives, like flowers, continue to unfold and living is a process, not an event. We have options and we have choices all along the way and we will never reach the status quo where we won’t have to be responsible for our choices and actions. That is the biggest gift of being human.

We are dynamic, acting, moving and always changing no matter how hard we try to resist it. We either move toward something life enhancing or toward something destructive. We are never ever static. We avoid getting things clear because we know that when we do we will have to make big choices in our lives. The good thing is that even if we don’t make them we will somehow be pushed toward our evolution and growth because something in us struggles for clarity. That haunting sense that we might be living a lie is true and will continue to haunt us until we do what we have to do in order to live a for us truly meaningful life. It is never too late and today is the perfect day to start by making a choice that leads us in the direction of growth. What is yours?