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Share"All first drafts are terrible. I don't care if you're Hemingway," a professor once said. What comes out unfiltered from anyone's mind is mud. One such unfiltered text message winged its way into my phone inbox a few nights ago causing a perfectly healthy friendship to sour. I ended up being at the receiving end of the muck that had accumulated in my friend's head that needed urgent spewing. The result was unpleasant, no doubt. But the after taste was so bitter that I'm now looking to close this chapter of my life.
I realise this isn't necessarily a step backward. It is, in fact, a leap forward. It's an extremely difficult decision - letting go. My heart melts at the thought of the good old times. But I believe this has to be done. How, then, are we ever going to make place for new relationships to form unless we allow some old ones to run their course so we can wean off the comfort of familiarity they provide? It's like freeing up disc space in the computer so new files can be loaded. This, of course, does not in anyway, mean that I must choose between old and new friendships. The human heart is large enough to accommodate more than we can ever imagine. It's just that, at times, the fear of letting go weighs too heavily, blocking good things from finding us.
Letting go also does not mean that it's the end. It only means that it's a temporary period of suspension before it comes back, maybe in a different form. A few days ago, I was surprised by a phone call from a school friend I had lost touch with more than ten years ago. Following the initial squeals of excitement and quick updates, she told me that it took her a chain of phone calls across cities to hunt down my coordinates.
Despite myself, I couldn't help asking why she was looking for me after all these years. She replied: "I was at an intensive Vipassana course in the Himalayas. During meditation, thoughts of you repeatedly came up in my mind. I felt I should get in touch with you. It's karma."
So here I am, thinking of closing one chapter of my life, and another old chapter is already reopening. We do go round in circles. And I'm sure that an unrevised late-night text message sent from the bar has a way of flying back to the sender-in good time.
