The Story of my Life

I learned about this poem from Aileen...Thanks Ai. For those who are trying to shut doors...

One always has to know when a stage comes to an end.
If we insist on staying longer than the necessary time,
we lose the happiness and the meaning of the other stages
we have to go through.

Closing cycles, shutting doors, ending chapters...
whatever name we give it, what matters is to leave in the past
the moments of life that have finished.

Did you lose your job? Has a loving relationship come to an end?
Did you leave your parents' house? Gone to live abroad?
Has a long-lasting friendship ended all of a sudden?

You can spend a long time wondering why this has happened.
You can tell yourself you won't take another step until you find out
why certain things that were so important and so solid on your life
have turned into dust, just like that...

But such an attitude will be awfully stressing for everyone involved:
your parents, your husband or wife, your friends, your children, your sister,
everyone will be finishing chapters, turning over new leaves, getting on with life,
and they will all feel bad seeing you at a standstill.

None of us can be in the present and the past at the same time,
not evern when we try to understand the things that happened to us.
What has passed will not return: we cannot forever be children,
late adolescents, sons that feel guilt or rancor towards our parents,
lovers who day and night relieve an affair with someone who has gone away
and has not the least intention of coming back.

Things pass, and the best we can do is to let them really go away.
That is why it is so important to really go away.
That is why it is so important (however painful it maybe) to destroy souvenirs,
move, give lots of things away to orphanages, sell or doante books you have at home.
Everything in this visible world is a manifestation of the invisible world,
of what is going on in our hearts and getting rid of certain memories also means
making some room for other memories to take their place.

Let things go. Release them. Detach yourself from them.
Nobody plays this life with marked cards, so sometimes we win
and sometimes we lose. Do not expect anything in return,
do not expect your efforts to be appreciated, you genius to be discovered,%0