life: acoustic & amplified

living who you are

Found on Paulo Coelho’s Blog:

Several times I gave received via Internet some texts attributed to me, as
the text below. I made several changes and decided to post it here:

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 is finishing
chapters, turning over new leaves, getting on with life, and they will
all feel bad seeing you at a standstill.

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 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, 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; marriage or 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 and shake off the dust.

Stop being who you were, and change into who you are.

– unknown (edited by Paulo Coelho)