Closing Cycles

Closing Cycles
by Paolo 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 for ever 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, and 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, and 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.


"Live as if you were to die tomorrow.
Learn as if you were to live forever."