Endings

We never like to think about them or talk about them, but endings are an integral part of life, probably the most important part even. If old things don’t end, new ones can’t start. And if new ones don’t start, how do we move forward? Yes, things evolve over time, and they appreciate but some other things remain stagnant, or worse still depreciate, and they have to be let go of. This makes me think about my grandfather and his gorgeous plants. I was that little girl (still am) that adored her grandfather and hung out with him as much as I possibly could. Every so often, he would take out his shears and prune his bushes. Sometimes he cut out dead branches. Sometimes, he cut out sick branches, usually after he had tried and tried to make them better and they weren’t getting any better. And sometimes (and this was the most puzzling to me) he cut out perfectly good branches. One day he explained it thus: every so often, the bush grows so phenomenally that it can’t support itself. So he goes in and looks for the branches that are just okay and he takes those out, leaving the best stuff to thrive. The plant only has a finite amount of nutrients and that is better spent on it’s best stuff, rather than shared with stuff that’s just okay.

I think that in life, sometimes you have to let things or people go or just put them on the back burner: when they’re not benefitting you and haven’t been for a while and they’re sucking the life out of you, when you can’t sustain them because you have so much going on, and when they’re causing you more pain than you can handle and you have tried your hardest to make changes but nothing has changed. But you also have to be very careful that you’re letting go of the correct things.