of closing cycles and shutting doors

Music: Finale from the Wicked OST

I'm not a Paolo Coelho fan. I can't even spell his name without checking the Internet first. I've read The Alchemist way back in college, and I thought it was pretty good. But that was the first and last book from PC that I've read (and will probably ever read). He's a good storyteller, and his fame is something that I could only ever hope to achieve, but, well, I guess he's just really not my cup of tea. His novels, I mean.

Anyway.

Despite that, PC wrote something that I've loved since the first time I read it a few months after college graduation. I was a bright-eyed, idealistic 21-year-old, nursing a broken heart from a recent breakup, and bam! I don't even know where I found it, or if it was shared by a wonderful friend out of concern. Nevertheless, the essay stayed with me, and five years after I first discovered its existence, I still love its message, and the things it made me realize.

So here it is, Closing Cycles, by Paolo Coelho. I hope it inspires you to close a cycle and start a new chapter in your life, just as it has inspired me many years ago.

Emphasis in bold are mine.

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