In life we should be able to fight for things. Nothing would come to us if we don’t spend part of our time, spirit and skills in creating goals and trying to achieve them. We learn that, one way or other, since we’re little kids. However, not all the time is appreciated in its real essence the true importance of knowing how to renounce to things.
If fighting for things is hard, renouncing to them is even worse. It resembles of a crime. It’s hard to renounce to something, no matter how many bad things it has, because it is always going to have some others that are good and that we may never see again. In other cases, it costs us to admit that we’re wasting our time in something that won’t work, so we keep on trying over and over again, failing miserably every time.
How many of us have been in bad relationships that we know we should put an end to? However, it’s hard. It’s hard because we remember when we first met and how beautiful everything was at the time. It’s hard because at some point we still love them and we know that in the world there are not too many like them. But the truth is that the relationship doesn’t work anymore. And we’re no longer the same that we were when we first met, and unfortunately, we’ll never be those again. It’s time to put an end to it. Yet we don’t do it.
If someone leaves us for another person, we immediately want to die. However, humiliating as it is, our capacity of renunciation activates by itself and our dignity forces us, sooner or later, to let it go. But if no one dumps us for nobody, then, in most cases, we’ll break up, then come back together again when we feel lonely, split again at the first shouting session, come back again on February 13th and so on until nothing remains: love, respect, nothing. That’s because we don’t know how to give up on things.
Some other times, we try to get things from life, no matter the consequences. A scholarship, for example. We say to ourselves “This is my moment”, “No one will take this from me” and all kind of positive mantras that we say any time we begin to plan something and that, however, few times we keep on saying when problems really start to appear. Later, it results that we have to sell our house in order to pay half of the grant (even though is a scholarship), but we say to ourselves that we have to make sacrifices in life in order to get something out of it. Then they tell us that we have to live in a house with 8 more people when we get there, that the course we’re applying to is not precisely in our field of studies and that actually the city in which we’re going to live is not the one we originally thought, but another “only” 200 kilometers far. However, we don’t give up and say to ourselves that probably this is a sign from destiny to prove our strength.
And one day, when our partner finally makes us something irreparable or we are informed that is required for the scholarship the birth certificate of the mother of the aunt of the grandfather of our sister, which is in Greece, we can’t help but feel that our nostrils stop working and that we really want to kill ourselves. The situation reaches a point in which it is impossible for our friends to recognize us when they see us walking in the streets, because we’re angered, sad and disappointed. And we discover that before, we were single and scholarshipless, but we weren’t disappointed. At least we had hope.
We have to be able to know how to renounce to things, even though it’s not easy. We have to build up the courage, take it all, the good and the bad, put it in the same bag and throw it to the nearest river. We’ll suffer by throwing out the good things, but we have to do it. We can’t have good without bad, and unbearable boyfriends and fascist scholarships are killing us. We have to be grown-ups about it: throw it all, give our backs to it and walk home, even though while walking we’ll feel something in our chests and in our throats. When we’ll get home a weird pace we’ll possess us: the peace of knowing that despite we feel temporarily bad, we did the right thing.
We have to see renunciation not as a defeat, but as an act of courage. Life will prove us in short time that we did the right thing, and some other love and scholarship will appear. Or maybe they won’t, but we’ll walk in the streets with the hope they’ll do appear, and hope is always better than disappointment.
