A few years ago, I was struggling to cope with the breakup of a relationship to the point where I thought the pain would never end. A psychologist friend of mine told me that all I had to do was leave the relationship and I would immediately begin to heal. The problem was that she couldn’t let him go; It was such a big decision to make and it scared the hell out of me to even contemplate it.
You see, this was the fourth time a relationship had failed me and I thought if I didn’t hold on to it, I would never realize my dream of growing old with someone by my side. My future looked very bleak and lonely so I had to hold on until my girlfriend realized how much she loved and missed me. Yes, yes, that was going to happen. Of course 6 months turned into a year and there was still no chance for him to recover, in fact he avoided me like the plague, but I kept hoping.
During all this time I compared all the girls I met with my ex and in my mind none of them would do. I refused to date in case my ex found out; I thought dating would definitely seal my illusion that she would return. What a torturous life she was leading.
Everything turned upside down one day when something happened that made me see things from a different angle. Some friends were going snow skiing and asked me to go with them. I had no ski experience and the idea scared the hell out of me; mainly because I didn’t want to make a fool of myself by falling all over the mountain. I went ahead and as expected I spent the first three days face down in the snow. It was all very humiliating, especially when five-year-olds skied past and made innocent comments about “the man with a ski lying in the snow.”
The fun part was that I progressed slowly but surely and with each new achievement I found my negative emotions being replaced by pride in my successes. So I started dreaming of getting off the nursery slopes and going up the mountain with my friends. As the days passed, I became more confident in my abilities and excited about the prospect of skiing down the mountain. I had one final ability to master and it looked like it was going to be the undoing of my plans; I had to learn to spin without falling on my face.
“It’s easy, just lean down the hill and your skis will follow,” you must be joking. Every survival instinct in my body was telling me to do the opposite, lean towards the hill. Surely if I go downhill I go headlong to the bottom; It was a long way to go and I wasn’t having any of it. Finally, in the middle of the fourth day I got it; I faced my fears, looked down the steep slope, and bowed. Wow, I couldn’t believe it, my skis flipped me and I was traversing the slope in the opposite direction. I had figured it out.
So, besides learning to ski, I learned another very important life lesson; sometimes we have to do the scary thing to get results. When I got back from that vacation my whole perspective had changed, I let go, started dating, and went back to being my old self. Guess what? A few months later my ex started contacting me again, I was suddenly attractive again, but unfortunately for her, by then I had moved on.
Go ahead, make that scary decision, let it go, move on, and start living again. Life is too short to spend it regretting what we have lost.
