Should I stay or should I go?

Should I stay or should I go?

All our beginnings follow something ending.  That most glorious beginning of new life, a birth, signals the loss of an old way of life. Autonomy and freedom for the parent, enclosed safety and shelter for the baby are now irrevocably gone.  A season of our lives is now completed, and we will not pass that way again.  And even when we anticipate that next phase most eagerly, it’s probably impossible not to experience some regret.

I recall the wild grief of our 4 year-old, burying his face in the chair cushions and crying inconsolably, after he graduated from his nursery.  “I will never, ever, ever go down the slide at St Joseph’s again!”  He felt that passing most keenly; our murmurings of new pleasures to look forward to couldn’t touch him in that moment.

Although new departures from the familiar can be frightening, John O’Donohue’s  To Bless the Space Between Us, urges us,

“We seem to think that beginning is setting out from a lonely point along some line of direction into the unknown.  This is not the case.  Shelter and energy come alive when a beginning is embraced.  A beginning is ultimately an invitation to open towards the gifts and growth that are stored up for us.  To refuse to begin can be an act of great self-neglect.”

That last phrase adjusts the lens we have habitually used to view our choices as sensible and approvable - by others and by ourselves.  Maybe they have been altruistic, or at least prioritising what we’d imagined as the needs of others.  But something within us has died.  Perhaps we resist acknowledging that discomfort, utilising a whole range of defence mechanisms to avoid confronting it.  We’re really good at that self-deception, but ultimately we need to confront that what used to work for us doesn’t any more.  We’re at a dead-end.

Life is not made for stasis or immobility, and the first step out of it is the bravest.  There are only two options.  You grow… or you die.     Letting go of something which has been precious to us is exquisitely painful, but acknowledging that “to everything there is a season”, as the writer of Ecclesiastes perceived, is the first step of the journey.  It is recognising, in the words of Arthur Burt, “Nothing happens until the pain of staying the same outweighs the pain of change.”  The cost is too high; “self-neglect” is a terrible, irresponsible price to pay  The small ego self, which has served us fine so far, yearns to grow and merge into that larger, infinite Self which is God.  And for that we should be thankful.  (Sometimes I wonder if our ego identity gets an unfair press.  Like Allan Sherman’s 1960s musical homage to skin, you could say it has held us together all these years!)   Can I propose we treat it with gratitude, humour and compassion, graciously allowing it a generous retirement?  Well done thou good and faithful servant!  But now we need to move on.

All blessings, Valerie

      September 2025