Thursday 27 October 2011

Let go - the best way to check out...

If you love somebody, let them go. If they come back, they'll always be yours; if they don't, they've never been.

Years go by and some adages will never go outdated. I heard that quote for the first time some nine years when I fell in love seriously for the first time, but from time to time it resounda in my head.

Letting go is actually about giving up on somebody and seems to be an act of surrender, but giving the loved one freedom to pursue their happiness is, in each case of unreciprocated love, the best possible choice.

Life doesn't always turn out the way we expect, but life musn't rest on compelling and killing other people with kindness. Floating in a realm of lies and delusions is in the long run even more crippling than loneliness. Attempts to pursue one's own happiness heedless of other people's emotions and feeling can lead only nowhere.

We should mind other people's emotions but shouldn't be constrained by them. However, we have right to pursue our own happiness, sometimes we can't do it without hurting other people, but no matter how absurdly it sounds, we should hurt them with care, gently.

Heartaches are never pleasant, but in a way they develop our emotions. Every wound one day heals. But some wounds cease to ache but leave scars that bring back painful memories.

Love's not only about being together with the loved one. True love consists in craving for someone else's happiness.

No, no, nothing bad's happened. Written for posterity, in case I forget it...

3 comments:

adthelad said...

Well add this to posterity ...

Funeral Blues by W H Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is Dead'.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good

And this http://tinyurl.com/4xdr3gg for some reading - I really recommend trawling through the comments as well.

student SGH said...

I suppose most people who've ever heard the poem know it from Four Weddings and a Funeral.

adthelad said...

Yes indeed.

re economics http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b016bhsr you might enjoy this as well - first part still available.