I pride myself on being friends with people who are much wiser than I am. Being friends with these people means that no matter what I go through, one of them has the advice I need to get through it. Recently, I got to have lunch with one of my really wise friends and talk about some of the billions of feelings I have constantly. A few of those feelings that I'd had were uncertainty, and sadness, and fear. College is what I like to call the revolving door stage of life. People are always coming and going, moving away and moving back, and just generally making big life choices that are the best for them. For someone like me, who hates change and loves the people she's friends with fiercely, this is really hard.
"I just feel like everyone that I love is leaving," I said to my friend.
"You can't think about it like that," she answered, and then explained to me what it means to live life with an open hand.
When your hand is open, the people you love can come and go as they please. They get to be a part of your life for as long as they are meant to, and then when they need to go, they are able to. They are free to come back when they can, and new people can come in and you can learn to love them as well. Your hand is never empty, and you get to love as many people as possible. When your hand is closed the people that you love can't leave. They have to fight to get out and live their lives. You feel bad because they fought to leave and they don't feel like they can come back because they had to fight to leave. It all started to make sense then, but it still didn't quite take the sting out of it.
"You have to change your perspective on it," she said. "Think about the kids you worked with back home. How must they have felt when you left to go to college?"
My kids were devastated when I left. I got plenty of letters saying they wished that I would come back and that they missed me.
"But you didn't leave because you didn't love them." she continued. "You left because you needed to go and get an education, and they even made it more difficult to leave. The people you love don't leave because of you. They leave because they have to, and you make it harder to leave." The idea that I had the capacity to make people leave me was for some reason, completely astounding. I thought back on all the change that had happened since I came to school.
It wasn't the perfect solution for how I felt. I still worry and I still wonder about everything that is going to happen in the coming months, but not as often as I used to, and not as deeply as I used to.
