At times we face a terrible moment in our lives when we realize we must lose someone we love. Whether the one we love is leaving us temporarily to go to a new school or job, or we are breaking up from a relationship, or our loved one is dying or has passed on, it is a very hard thing to let go of someone we love and to let them go on without us.
Perhaps the most terrible pain we may face in life is to lose someone near and dear to us. It may seem as if the pain of our loss will utterly destroy us. It may seem so terrible that we cannot want to go on living without them. Indeed many people pine away after they lose their lifelong lover and simply will themselves to die, while others take a quicker step through the dark door from life to death.
It is the most horrible thing I know how to feel to be missing someone I have loved, even if they are in the room next door. For once the reality of our separation from someone we have dearly loved appears we may be bereaved to a point of utter desolation.
In whatever manner we become parted from our loved one, whether they most go to seek their fortunes, or are taken away from us by duty, whether they leave us by choice or are taken by death, we may feel painfully alone and inconsolable in our grief. But we must go on. To do anything less than to hold our chins high and meet the new empty day with courage and confidence in ourselves only demeans the truth and beauty of the love we shared with the child, parent, lover or friend whom we are missing.
Whether our loved one stands on the other side of life's dark doorway into the beyond that we fear as death, or whether they only stand in the next room away from us, a deep part of those whom we love will always love us in return and be concerned for us and want us to go on and to be happy. Our love is an eternal thing; it exists outside of time and space and fills the universe with its joy from end to end in the moment it first blossoms in our hearts. We ephemerally limited beings often fail to see this truth because we live for the moment and as soon as the connection to the presence of our love has waned we begin to feel the painful separation of it and want to go back to that moment or move on quickly to the next moment when we are once more in the arms of one whom we love and can again feel the joy of our love overwhelm us with its sweet comfort.
Love is so far beyond all other joys in life that our entire lives may seem to be eclipsed in the moment we lose someone we dearly love. What would be the worth and joy of love if this were not so? Love is valued beyond measure, it is so infinite in regard to the depths it penetrates us to reach our soul. Love is a liberating force that frees us from fear and pain and worry and loss. Love is an uplifting force that motivates us to strive to be our very best. Love is a binding force that knits us warmly to our family, friends, communities and world. But love does not complete us or make us whole.
We must be complete and whole and we must fully and unconditionally love ourselves to be able to fully accept and experience the love that is shared between two people. Love may complement us so that two people with different strengths are stronger together than they could be individually. Love may balance us so that where we are timid or overly brave our loved one may show us a different way to be that can help us to live happier healthier lives. Love makes so much more of us than we may be aware of in ourselves because it brings the fresh perspective of another person's perceptions of ourselves to us to teach us truths about ourselves that we were missing or could not see or understand.
So when we face the terrible moment when we lose someone we dearly love we seem to lose so much more than just the person we love, we seem to lose parts of ourselves as well. Our grief goes beyond the outward loss of the person we love and encompasses an inner loss of ourselves, the loss of parts of us that blossomed in the gifted sight of our loved one's eyes.
There seems so much to lose when we are parted from someone we dearly love, but all the loss is an illusion. We have been given so much in the sharing of our love with one another that we are forever made richer by the gifts of our love. While we cannot live eternally in the past to remain in the presence and effulgence of the love of someone we are missing, many of us do try to do just that. It is a natural response to hold onto our attachments to someone we love after they are gone, whether they will be gone only minutes or forever.
Holding onto our loved one through these strong attachments forged in the hot passion of our love is a dangerous thing that puts our lives at risk. Attachments to any part of the past may draw us away from living in the present moment and diminish our capacity to experience joy and happiness and love here and now. We may so divorce ourselves from our lives in the present moment that we become despondent or physically ill as a consequence because by holding onto these attachments we are neglecting ourselves and neglecting our lives, failing to care for ourselves adequately or to experience life fully with all the passion we have within us.
Again, this only demeans the gift of the love we have shared with the person whom we miss. Even if deeply estranged from us or miserably angry with us, deep in the hearts of our missing loved ones, where love always remains real and present, our loved ones would never want us to fail to live to the fullest depths of our capacity to experience joy and happiness and love.
So we must let go. Whether we are letting go for only minutes, hours, days, or eternity, we must simply let go of all of our attachments to anyone we love. When we release ourselves from those attachments, whether in a healthy relationship, or in a relationship that has failed, or in circumstances in which we simply cannot remain together in our lives, we are actually enabling ourselves to experience the love we believe we are missing. We can never go back to the past to find our love for it is always in the present. When we release ourselves from our attachments to those we love we enable ourselves to experience the effulgence of our love completely without hesitation or reservation so that our lives once more are sweeter and full of comfort and joy.
So let go to let in the love that is real. Accept today for what it is, an opportunity to find everything you may seek in life and to love and be loved by everyone you meet. And who knows? With your head held up and your eyes wide open someone very special may appear that you may otherwise have missed. So let go to let love return to your heart. Just let go.
I know this may sound difficult to do but it is really not so hard to do. When you feel the love that is an attachment it always leads to a moment in the past where the pain of separation still dwells. Learn to anticipate that pain and to move away from it before it can return to you. You move away from it by engaging the real world around you in whatever way it most urgently needs to be addressed, whether it is chores or exercise or adventuring, when you let go your life moves on and you make your life richer now.
