M challenged me with Tough advice when she told me to Let go of the past and move forward. The more deeply I felt my loss, the tighter my bonds to the past became. Each time M challenged me to let go of the past, I made an excuse not to let go. M finally challenged me to let go of my excuse making. It wasn’t easy, but as M told me, I had a choice. Here is an excerpt from Dancing Alone: Learning to Live Again where I wrestled with this decision.
“It’s easier for me to live in the past where I was happy rather than figure out how to live in the present in a way that added meaning to my life and held on to the hope that happiness would one day find me again. I realized I developed excuse-making into a professional skill as excuses rolled off my tongue as easy as grass turns green in the spring.
If I really wanted to dance with suffering and grieving, I would need to let go of what held me to the past with a death grip and not make excuses about moving forward. Easier said than done, but I would give it my best. I wanted to dance with grieving.”
Dancing Alone: Learning to Live Again. Available in paperback and ebook formats from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iTunes, and Kobo.
Excerpt From
Dancing Alone: Learning to Live Again
Raymond Calabrese
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I agree, it is very easy to cling to the past when we went through something terrible, to use it as an excuse to stay in a hole and only do what is absolutely necessary. I was weighed down by guilt and no hope for the future for a long time, but I have come to realize that nothing in life is for certain. What I fear could happen again might happen again, but that is no reason not to try to do what I can do. Precious things can be taken away from us, but that is no reason to stay away from them for fear of pain. Tomorrow holds no certainity, despite all our plans, and nothing in life is forever, no matter how precious it is. But that should not weigh us down, but make us appreciate the precious. To me, sanity has become a very precious thing, and that it might be taken away from me somewhere in the future is no reason not to use it now to do good things.
Thank you for your heart felt comment. Your words echo what so many others feel. Like you, once I accepted that life wasn’t fair, I knew I had to push an optimism button and walk toward the future with hope and a smile. Have a great day. Ray