Letting Go

Rob Christiaans

Finding the Secret, 

Hidden but Difficult Beauty 

in Every Ending

The ending of relationships, the ending of friendships, the ending of a work, a conversation that is making us smaller, a book we are trying to write, or even a single line of a poem: all of them difficult, all of them, in their particular form of ending, necessary. 

We find most endings difficult and nearly all of them hurtful and traumatic and yet almost always afterwards, after each ending, we find we would never voluntarily reverse things and go back to our old life.

The poet Rilke said 

‘Be ahead of all parting’ 

as an invitation to a radically anticipatory way of living that is just as committed to letting go as it is to taking on.

The stakes are always high in every letting go and every ending. 

The way we leave can shape our new life to the good or to the bad. 

In the very seed of the ending and the integrity with which we make the passage from old to new, grows the fresh and vibrant life that emerges so surprisingly from our difficult moving on.

The ability to anticipate these new arrivals and hold to what is firm and true through all our successive experiences of falling apart is exactly what makes a foundation for a new life, a new home, a new love or a new work. 

The hidden beauty of endings almost always lives in the letting go. 

What is marvelous and truly beautiful in a new life always arises from what is initially invisible, from what seems like a secret; from what is hidden, both inside us and in the very physical world into which we are stepping.

 David Whyte