The Art of Letting Go – Carrying People without Clinging

It was 2009, and I was standing at the bus stop waiting in line to go home. It hadn’t been a great start to my college year, especially because my close friends and I had been split into different shifts.

Most of my time was spent wondering how great it would’ve been to continue college with my two closest friends.

For a kid of that age, not being in the same classroom as your closest friends felt like one of life’s biggest worries.

As the bus approached the stop, I spotted my buddies getting off. I got very excited to finally see them after a few days and get a chance to talk. But when they got off the bus, they gave me a quick high-five and left without much interaction continuing their chatter. As if nothing had happened.

It felt cold – maybe they were indifferent, or just not as excited to see me.

The fact that my presence didn’t excite them was unexpected – and a bit painful. I felt dejected. It was the first time I had experienced a feeling like that.

Maybe I was overthinking – but you feel what you feel, and you can’t control what you feel.

With time our contact faded and eventually became dead.

Most of us have probably experienced the sting of fading friendships at some time in life.

You start to wonder if you did something wrong to push them away, or if you aren’t cool enough to be a part of their inner circle anymore, or if you should try harder to win them back.

However, some relations exist only in our mind. They appear one-sided, start to feel like work, and stop feeling natural after a point.

And yet we hold on to them – stubbornly watering a plant that is dead, trying our best to revive it, rejecting the fact that it isn’t the same anymore.

If it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and looks like a duck – then it probably it is a duck.

When I think about such relations in hindsight, I realize letting go was the best I could’ve done –for my own peace and closure.

Letting go is a deeply personal process of releasing things that have already left you. Letting go doesn’t mean those friendships weren’t valuable.

Some of the traits that I carry today come from the impressions those friendships left on me. I still make salad the way my roommate used to make me in college, I discovered my favorite songs through someone I no longer talk to, and I phrase some of my jokes the way one of friends used to in class.

We unknowingly collect pieces of people as we go through life – it’s like we are a mosaic of everyone we have met.

Dismissing those people is perhaps like dismissing all those traits and qualities that have subconsciously become ours.

Letting go doesn’t mean forgetting – it means choosing space over clinging, presence over nostalgia, and gratitude over regret. Sometimes the best way to cherish a friendship is to release it and simply thank it for what it gave you. And when you do, you realize nothing was wasted, and nothing is truly lost.

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