“Most of our troubles are due to our passionate desire for and attachment to things that we misapprehend as enduring entities.” ~Dalai Lama

We all want to be happy, feel good about our lives, and yet we get attached to things that bring us nothing but grief and pain. A job, home or friends, there are so many things to which unknowingly we get so attached that if changed they leave us heart broken. But one lesson that I have learned in my life is that in order to become stronger, you need to let go things that make you weaker.

When we are happy, we feel that the happiness is due to the materialistic things in life. When I was in college, a friend of mine gave me a special locket as a birthday present, I was happy and kept that locket with me since a very long time. When the locket broke, I felt a deep void as if something was taken away from me. But what I didn’t realize was that it is not the locket that gave me happiness but the gesture of my friend for buying it was important. It symbolized our friendship and I didn’t need any locket to remember her. This realization made our friendship even stronger and that too without any special objects as memories.

It’s Not Easy, I Know

Till date I have a closet full of things from my past, greeting cards, friendship bands, keychains, rings, and what not. Each and every item is a symbol of an incident in the past and I have tried to preserve those since a long time. When I had to shift houses, it was a tough choice for me, how can I let go of those memories. I felt as if I needed to take each item with me to remember my past, but as I was traveling abroad, I could not take those with me as taking the items of basic needs was more important. So, after a spending lot of emotional hours looking at those things, I took a big box and dumped all the items in it. I even marked the box “MEMORIES”.

That was a beginning of letting go of things. I will never forget the people who gave me those things, but putting them in a box made way to bring new people in my life and not compare them with my past. In order to remember my old friends, I didn’t need some card or band, I had the memories in my heart, in my talks and in my writing. I have begun to feel that items need to be preserved for people who have weak memory which thanks to God I don’t have.

Is it easy, you may ask, and I would say NO. Letting go is not easy, but when you understand the pros and cons it definitely makes the job easy.

When you get up every morning, ask yourself, what is one thing I do not need in my life and discard that thing. Clear up the junk in your closet and in your brains and make way for new memories to crop in. Trust me, life would be much happier and you would be stronger!