Moving On By Nehemiah Phiri

Moving On By Nehemiah Phiri

I’ll be honest with you: Moving on isn’t easy. If it wasn’t for my experience , I’d think moving on is just a matter of putting the past behind us. I mean, you want to move on? Just forget about the past! Get over it. Look onward to the future. Keep yourself busy with other things.

Uhm-uhm– not so easy. While these do help in some way, I realized that there is more than meets the eye. No matter how I tried to push away the past, it hung there like a shroud, affecting the way I thought about myself, my decisions, and my actions. I didn’t realize this until I came to the realizations which helped me let go. Ultimately, there was past baggage to clear and subconscious, erroneous beliefs to untangle before I could really move on. All these require an ability to think consciously and to maintain a level of objectivity, which is hard because such matters are usually linked to deep sorrows and injured pride.
Often, we think we have moved on but we haven’t. This was the case for me in the past few years. For the longest time, while I thought I had moved on, subconsciously I had not. Thinking you have moved on and having really moved on are two separate situations altogether. In the former, you continue to live under the shadow of that person or relationship without realizing it. You think you have been liberated but the truth is you are still living in a mental prison as you keep thinking about the person and past memories. This prevents you from receiving new things in your life.

With every broken relationship comes baggage. The (a) longer and (b) more intense your relationship was, the more baggage you’d have accumulated. The length of time when we were in close, active communication made it more harder. Not very long compared to others, yet there was so much baggage to be cleared in my head! If your relationship was longer, I can imagine there must be a lot more for you to deal with.

Our baggage will be a mixture of sadness, regret, hope, wistfulness, melancholy, disappointment. If the relationship was intense, your baggage will probably include hate, grief, anger, fear, shame and other deeper emotions. It’s natural to feel these. Whatever the emotion is, open yourself to the emotion fully. This means if you hate the person, feel that hatred. If you feel sad, soak in your sadness. If you feel the need to grief, then please grief. Cry if need be. Take time out for yourself to process these feelings. Don’t block them away. Embrace them and accept them.

Don’t bottle them in, because as we all know they will explode in the future when least expected. You might have heard of people who claim to have moved on by shutting off / avoiding their emotions altogether. They may feel like they have moved on, but what’s really happening is the issue has just become so deeply buried that it doesn’t cause any immediate reaction. It’s like having a cut that is healed on the surface but still has impurities underneath the scar. To complete the cleansing process, all the dirt has to be cleansed. To do so you need to first acknowledge and accept your feelings.

A big reason why you can’t move on is likely that you keep seeing him/her as “the one” for you. You just can’t see yourself with anyone else but him/her. Such fixations are dangerous. This leads you to linger on and on, hoping for a “someday” which will never come. Not only that, it leads to a lot of mental projections – both on you and of him/her.

One thing I’ve realized is that if the party does not have the 110% intention to be together, then he/she is not the one for you. I always believe if real intention is there, any obstacles, no matter how insurmountable, can be overcome. If the intention isn’t there, then anything else can come forth as a “reason” for not being together.

If you keep thinking that you guys will be together once the circumstance changes, or once the timing changes, or once you are a better person, then perhaps this isn’t the right person. These prerequisites are signals this relationship isn’t meant to be. Because ultimately, it’s not about the right place or right timing. It’s about whether he/she is the right person. If he/she is the right person, you guys would have been together regardless of how wrong the place or timing is. That’s why it’s called the right person.