In the last few years, I have mastered the practice of goodbye. Planes, trains and automobiles have taken me places to try new things. The move of geography by force rather than choice to obtain something not offered in a previous location. Be education, experience, freedom, or language, the choice of goodbye has always been geographical, and unforgiving in it's requirements. This is how I have known my goodbyes. This is how I have known the harder choice, the harder decision for the gamble on a better result.
I have left lovers...
The first goodbye is always the hardest, and yet, the easiest. Instead of choosing goodbye, goodbye chose me with a good swift kick in the ass. With the subtly of a bull in a China shop, reluctantly, goodbye was more of the only answer rather than a choice. Ahhh, the wisdom of youth, as I have said before. Take away my options, and I still have a hard time choosing.
But eventually, I smartened up and packed up, making one of the hardest, yet best decisions I have ever made... or not made. The risk of never loving again was much better, and much safer, than staying with the known enemy in the bedroom.
Then I said goodbye to geography...
Though in the beginning, I did my best to take as much of the geography with me as I could. Trucks full of belongings, animals, people occasionally... anything to make my new home feel like the old. More than just physical baggage was represented. A new life blended with the old... what was it that Jesus said about old wine in new wine skins? Yeah, I found that out the hard way, $2,000 worth of hard way in the form of shipping costs. Oh the cost of learning.
But reluctantly, those ties gave away, and the baggage has gotten progressively better. Three large bags on the way home for Christmas, two for Spring Break and eventually, one for 7 weeks in Paris. The geography no longer holds my heart, and I have allowed myself to fall in love with new places and people and things in spite of my loyalty to a past that has rarely been loyal to me. Slowly acclimating to different ways of life, different goals and different desires, the future begins to have more attraction then the past and the goodbyes bigger, and more extreme - lessons in humility through idiotic exchanges of cultural missteps (and that was just DC) free of charge.
But what happens, when goodbye becomes not a geographical move, but one of the heart? As the goodbyes have changed, their nuances have as well. From glaring as the lights off the Eiffel Tower, to the most subtle, in new ways of growth. The trouble is, the more subtle and less obvious, the more difficult and... almost more painful.
These are the goodbyes of the heart. The ones you didn't know existed until they become inevitable. The crossroads not of life choices, but life pursuits. Heart pursuits guide life, not only by the extreme choices of work, school, lovers and geography, but the small everyday maneuvers that determine the direction of a life far more powerful than the forks in the road. Those daily choices are the river shaping the rocks. They come so fast and so easily, and yet before you know it, you wake up and are 49 years old wondering how you got there.
The river is powerful though. It rushes with great speed, making it far too easy to let it take you away rather not knowing the direction, or caring for that matter. The patterns worn in by the river become difficult to distinguish between desire and fate.
But as soon as the goodbyes previously made sink in and have their effect, geographies and new loves collide with the old, leaving the inability to mix worlds. All of the sudden the sound of the river is no longer comforting, but instead frightening and all too familiar. Old loyalties, paths, and patterns are unsatisfying, but goodbye doesn't seem right. How do you say goodbye to something that has been all you have ever known?
Whether it be a goal, a dream, a home, a friend... these are things I had once defined myself by. The collidascope I had determined my choices through. Right, wrong, or indifferent, it is what I have known, and now, now... saying goodbye to something that is ethereal, and ambiguous, and sometimes all to real, standing next me, seems counter intuitive. But just because they are what I have always known, doesn't make them good, or right, or acceptable.
As I change, those things - people, places, or things - that can't change with me either chafe with the river to the point of bleeding, or more goodbyes have to come. The risk is once again, how do you say goodbye to one dream without another to lean on, or one home, when another is yet to be found, or worse yet... a friend, when they are so few and far between? Do I accept the present enemy hoping I won't find a worse one around the corner, or do I meet another challenge with another goodbye?
But as I look back at all of the goodbyes I have met so far, something dawns on me: I have always been met with a hello. It hasn't always been the greeting I have wanted, and it hasn't always been immediately following the goodbye, but there has always been one, and it has always been better than what I left behind.
I can't determine my future, but I can determine in whom I trust with it. I don't fear loneliness as I once did, and I don't fear the unknown as badly as I have, what I fear is allowing all that once was to determine the rest of my life because I was afraid to say goodbye again. If the all that had known before, doesn't know me now, than maybe it never it did, and maybe that... that is why I have to say goodbye to it. And full circle I come, back to allowing Him to tell me who and what I am rather than a past and present I accepted because it was all I had known.
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