An old friend of mine sent this to me.. I thought i was worthy of posting here....
How do you say good-bye?
It’s never easy. Good-bye is a great big, scary kind of a word.
It so easily stirs feelings of sadness, abandonment, and loss. It can make us feel alone and afraid even before we’ve said it; even before someone we care about has gone away. It’s such a final kind of word.
Some people go to great lengths to avoid it altogether.
When people they love are leaving, they pat them on the shoulder and tell them to have a great time. They never say good-bye. They never say, “I’ll miss you a lot!” They never look them lovingly in the eye and say, “Thanks for being here.” And of course it certainly wouldn’t occur to them to share the particular memory of the departing person that so endeared you to him or her in the first place.
They’re just so bloody cheerful!
It’s as if your departure, or the departure of one about whom you have grown to love, is of no real consequence at all. Nope, life moves on. Nothing real gets exchanged, and they’ve missed a wonderful opportunity to have what I call a “GOOD” good-bye. Lots of us miss those chances. We hide, afraid of the intense feelings of loss. Or perhaps we don’t have intense feelings of loss because where the person or place in question is concerned, we never really allowed ourselves to say “hello”. You know what I mean.
How many of us have moved to a new town, or a new school, or a new job, and said – almost immediately: “I can’t STAND these people – I can’t get along with them at all.” Or: “I hate this place/this school/this town. I’ll never be happy here.” Well, that behavior is pretty normal. It’s protective behavior. But it does mean that if it is the attitude you adopt, when it comes time to leave that school, town, job, or people, you won’t feel any deep sentiments of loss because you never decided to say hello in the first place. This is the core of my philosophy about saying a GOOD Good-bye: you cannot say a GOOD good-bye unless you have first decided to say hello.
You don’t even have to be new to the area to miss out on saying hello. How many times have we all passed through our lives so beset with worries, deadlines, preoccupations, and fragments of past conversations that we’ve held but wished we’d said a different way ringing in our minds that we don’t notice anyone or anything around us? I certainly have, and this is normal, of course, for us all. But if your head is chattering incessantly at us all the time in this way, how can we ever look up from what we are doing and see who and what is around us at the time?
This is what I’m talking about. How can you ever say good-bye if you never really saw anyone in the first place?
We will never master the fine art of saying a good good-bye unless we have taken the time to see one another; unless we can remind each otherto “rest for a moment on the forming edge of our lives [and] resist the headlong tumble into the next moment; until we can look into one another’s faces and see there communion: the reflection of our own eyes.”
You see, learning to SEE is a conscious choice; it is a decision we make.
So here’s my theory: Not only do all of us need the experience of being seen, of being smiled at and being told, “I see you”, but all of us need to offer that experience to those around us; for unless you’ve really SEEN someone, you’ll never be able to engage in a good good-bye.
Sometimes we feel shy about looking someone else in the eyes, smiling and saying, “I SEE you.” But there is nothing more important in the entire world than being seen, and being welcomed with a smile that says: I am so glad you are here.
Sometimes we feel shy about looking someone else in the eyes and smiling and saying, “I SEE you”. But there is nothing more important in the entire world than being seen, being welcomed with a smile that says: I am so glad you are here.
This is the secret of a good good-bye. You cannot engage in a heartfelt good-bye with someone you have never really seen, but once you have seen them and been seen in return, once your eyes light up just thinking about seeing each other, then the best of all possible good-byes is poised to take place. For instead of thinking of good-bye as forever, you can look at each other and smile, and say, “Adieu – until I see you again.”
Have you seen anyone today?
