While cleaning my bookshelf I chanced upon an old list nestled between the pages of one of my books. Though there was no date on the paper, it had yellowed considerably giving me an idea that the list was a decade old, if not more.
On that paper, I listed out the things I wanted to do in the next year. As my eyes ran down the list I realized I had done a few of them, had outgrown a few others and the remaining sounded naïve to me now.
The list, so lovingly written out then was crushed and binned in a second. I could do that because I had moved on. Experiences had reshaped me and I had evolved into a different person.
As we grow we rarely give a thought to our growth. We accumulate excess baggage in the form of unfulfilled wishes and dreams, unsaid thoughts, and suppressed emotions. If that is not enough we stay in relationships, jobs, and situations that we stagnate in. And we then wonder why we aren’t happy.
We should give everything, whether it is emotional, physical, or material, a time frame. Everything should have a shelf life. If we use it in that time frame we have used it well. If we don’t, then we have to let them go.
Like those clothes clogging our cupboards which we looked forward to wearing after we lose ‘those last 5 kgs’, or vessels gathering space in the kitchen because they are of no use to us anymore, or even thoughts and emotions that are serving us no purpose other than dragging us behind or keeping us where we were.
We need to learn this important lesson; ‘Things that don’t move forward should be left behind’. So that we can shrug off our baggage and move on to newer and better things awaiting us around the corner.
