Okay, let’s all practice now. Hold your breath until you turn blue in the face. Do this until you feel like you can do it on command. Congratulations! Keep doing it, and you’ll be good at dying in no time!
(Please, tell me that you know I’m kidding. I don’t need any of my readers dropping dead on me. What if you die before hitting the “like” button?)
But still, you should get better at dying in a metaphorical sense. And what could I possibly mean by that? I simply mean that you need to get good at saying goodbye, at leaving it all behind, and starting over. Because you are going to be doing that a lot in life, not only with other people, but more often, with yourself.
Let’s see if this scenario is familiar: a person from your past or slightly distant present has a beef with you over something. Whether you forgot to text him/her last night or you weren’t keen to listen to their latest drama-filled story, you brushed them off, accidentally. What is the first stone thrown in the argument that ensues? You’ve changed. The old (insert your name here) wouldn’t act this way. The old (insert your name here) was my friend.
Except, what that other person is really saying is that you are not acting in accordance with how he or she thought you should act. How dare you not stick to the script of your own life!
Which is just about as ludicrous as it sounds. You, believe it or not, are going to die a few “deaths” in your lifetime. You, though your friend may not believe it, are going to change, radically. You may have already “died” a few times already, as you had to reinvent yourself to survive. When you first experienced heartbreak, when you moved out of your parents’ house, when you lost someone who was close to you, etc.
Now, anyone who has lost someone dear to them can tell you that they are never really gone. We carry them with us because they’re bodies were too tired to carry the weight of their full soul. And that is what will happen to you. You will die, in a sense, but continue to live. You will say goodbye to the person that you once were, but you will never lose them. You will simply tuck that part of you away, for safekeeping.
And you should. Humans, by nature, have to adapt. We need to be able to keep changing and growing with our environment. It would be a real, true sort of death if we weren’t able to do that. If we weren’t able to keep going after we thought life had ended for us.
Of course, I’m sure you’re worried about losing yourself in this dying in life process. What if I shed a layer of myself that I wanted to keep? Well, put simply, everyone has a lighthouse inside them. The seas of our souls can get stormy, and they can obscure the lighthouse, sometimes the ocean spray can put the light out altogether. But you can and will relight them.
You see, people fall in love with each other’s lighthouses. That is to say, people fall in love with the core of who they are, not who you are or who you were or who you will be. They fall in love with something far less tangible and far more constant.
In the end, you need to get good at dying. You need to recognize that you will never live forever as the person that you are, but that you will build and create yourself, the person you were always meant to be. The sooner you say goodbye, the easier it will be to begin anew. Like the tides that meet the shore, you will fade and ebb and then surge and surge again. You can rely on this cycle, as so many boats out to sea rely on you.
Bailey Dailey 