The Art of Letting Go

No matter what the circumstances are, break ups are always hard. You spend hours, days, months or years with someone and to have it all go away with a blink of an eye is a bit overwhelming. You start to over analyzing everything and are engulfed in anger, sadness, confusion, and resentment. Hateful thoughts rush your mind - "I can't believe I just wasted all this time on someone.", "$#@% him/her", "I hate them". When you break up, hate is usually almost always the easiest way to go, but is it truly worth it?

In Ethnolinguistics and Cultural Concepts: Truth, Love, Hate & War, James W. Underhill discusses that love and hate are not only different in specific regions of the world, but how they evolve over time. There is a theory that hate evolved so that one group of hunter-gatherers would not feel bad about stealing food and resources from another group. They hated in order to stay alive. In current times, is it really necessarily to hate the person in order to stay alive? I'd like to think the opposite. When you hate someone, it starts to consume your mind.

In Neural Correlates of Hate, Semir Zeki and John Paul Romaya discusses how romantic love and hate share similar responses in the brain when activated - the putamen and the insula. Instead of deactivating it and suppressing it, we switch to the opposite. We go from romantic love to hate. Sometimes the putamen is even activated when we feel jealous or upset with a lover. We start to become obsessive with the break up when we start to hate. Zeki and Romaya continue on to discuss that a part of our brain - superior frontal gyrus - is suppressed when a person starts to feel hate. This part of the brain is associated with obsessive-compulsive behavior when repressed. As a result, we tend to over analyzing every part of the previous relationship and the resentment starts to build up consuming our daily thoughts. I'm not too sure about you, but this does not sound appealing to me at all. So what is the best way that we can truly let go and move forward? Love.

In 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Steven Covey discusses how love is a verb. His friends and family members seek advice and talk to him about wanting to get a divorce because they do not feel love towards that person. Covey responds with "love them.". Love is a verb - an action. Learning to love the person flaws and all. It's so easy to hate the person, but when you love someone, there is a sense of peace. There are different types of love. Love of a friend, of a family or of a lover. And when you love, you learn to let go. Letting go is allowing yourself to love the person you knew and accepting that things change, just like the seasons and life in general. Accepting the fact that you did everything in your power to make it work again and the rest is in God's hands.
"But love your enemies, do to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked" Luke 6:36

When my boyfriend and I broke up, each day felt like someone had ran me over with a truck. It was so hard to get up, I would wake up with headaches and wanted to just sleep all day. I was depressed, and sad. After two weeks of crying in bed all day, I forced myself to get up. Each day I got up, I wanted to hate him for the time I wasted, but I knew deep in my heart that I couldn’t hate him. He came into my life for a reason and he helped me get back to my feet when my father passed away. He left - at perfect timing - so that I could walk on my own two feet again. And I had to let that go. As a control freak, this was not easy. But I realized that there are only two things you can control, your attitude and your actions. So let go. I know it seems like it is easier said than done, and trust me it is.

Cherish the memories you once had and embrace the process of growth. Everything in life is temporary and nothing belongs to us. We come into this world with nothing and we leave with nothing - except the memories we formed during the journey of life. So hold on to the memories that made you the person you are today, because everyone in our life has a purpose. People come in and out of our lives - they ebb and flow like the tide whether we want them to leave or not. But that does not mean we can just throw away the memories that you’ve gained. Those memories - the good and the bad - has taught you something or made you into a better person. Understand that no matter how much it hurts, sometimes relationships may not work right now or that it wasn't meant to and there is someone out there for you.

People have to go through things to learn and grow, so when they come into your life the first time, they may not be ready for you. You both have to live a little more and experience life more before they become the person you are meant to be with. Or maybe you are the one who needs to live a little more before they are ready to be with you. Either way, trust that God already has a perfect man or woman already picked out for you. You just have to trust Him and walk in the path He has for you and he'll do the rest.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight Proverbs 3:5-6