Moving On
A couple of days ago, one of my close friends said to me, “I really need to move on, I still love him”. Her seemingly simple statement struck a chord in me. I wondered, “Do we really have to stop loving people if we want to move on from them”. I believe it is never possible to stop loving someone. Isn’t love irreversible, irrevocable, and always “A turn taken”. You can’t come back to the junction in your life where you fell in love and undo it. You can’t expect your little sensitive soul to not feel anything for someone who meant everything to you someday. So, the question boils down to, “Do people never really move on then?” and my answer to this would be — “Of course they do”. People move on, they learn and unlearn, they channelize their pent-up emotions and most importantly, we human beings always have a tendency of being pulled to our happy places, and sooner or later we end up just there.
There is a stark difference between still loving and not moving on. They are NOT the same things. Let me go ahead and redefine moving on.
“Moving on simply means taking the control of your life back in your hands” It doesn’t mean blocking someone on social media or never seeing their face again or hating them or ending all your feelings for them. It just means, the driving force in your life is YOU, even if you love someone else.
It means attaining the power to accept what you can’t change and change whatever you want to in your span of control.
About a month ago, I somehow came across some old pictures which I had forgotten to delete. As soon as I saw the photos, I pressed the close button. I thought I was not ready to see the pictures yet, to go down that memory lane and come back hurt. It took me a while to realize that I was so wrong. I took a couple of deep breaths and opened my folder again. I saw each and every picture in the folder. I saw the brightness in my eyes, the sanguine color of my cheeks, the evident peace on my face. I had almost started looking for tissues when I realized that there aren’t any tears at all. Seeing these pictures reminded me of a lot of things, happy and sad but there was one realization that was sinking in gradually, giving me a sense of peace that I have felt very rarely in my life. It was my inner voice telling me “Back in the days, when those pictures were taken, the person sitting in the driver’s seat of your life was him, Now it’s only YOU”
There are phases in life that are so difficult that it feels like they will last forever and there are phases which we want to last forever but guess what. They don’t. In both cases, the phases end and we start over, each time with more learnings than before. When it comes to love, I have a very simple take on it. A part of me will always love the people I have ever loved — be it the friend who betrayed or the boyfriend who left but I don’t want them back in my life because they don’t serve any purpose in my life.
To everyone, who thinks they will move on, only when they find someone else or start hating the person they love, one small piece of advice — Take it easy and be a little less harsh on yourself. Things change and they take time and even when everything in life seems turbulent, you can still move on. And just like Lisa Nichols says, It is all about not having a half-filled cup when you fall in love, expecting the other person to fill it, rather, having a 100% full cup when you fall in love, so that the presence of the other person makes it overflow and You can fill your cups yourself anytime you choose to
