I think we all have had times in our lives when we had to move on, whether we liked it or not. When we usually think of this phrase – moving on – we think of romantic ‘entanglements’ we have had.
We loved and lost.
We loved and let go.
We loved and had someone say – thanks, but no.
With love it’s obvious.
Even if it’s just lust or infatuation, unless you marry and spend the rest of your days together, a time will come, to let go to some degree. Otherwise, you never move on. And sure, these people always have a place in our hearts, the heart is bigger than it seems, you see, and there is always room, but it’s a matter of letting go of the direct attachment.
Letting go of the ‘need’ for that person.
The ‘want’ of them.
It takes time but you can.
The one we think less of but not that much less is the letting go of friends.
These are hard, harder than we often realize.
Love gets in you like a weed and wraps itself around your heart and can be hard to extract.
Friendship, deep friendship, phew, those are roots that go through your heart and deeper. You can cut them free but there’s always remnants that will stay with you.
Memories that never fade.
But people change, as we love to say.
And it’s lovely to say that but it’s true.
We change because of our home life, our work life, our internal life.
We change because of our views of the world.
We change because we realize that the friends we have don’t reflect back what we shine on them.
Reciprocation isn’t always there, but it’s the ideal.
You want to know that the favors you are doing are available in return should you need them.
You wanna know that it’s a friendship, not a usury.
I turned my back on a lot of people in the past years.
Some because I didn’t feel they shined back on me, caught up in their own lives to really think about it. And that’s fine. We all get to change. It just is sad when it happens.
Others I have walked away from because I needed a change in myself and unfortunately, the price was some of these fringe people who I just connect with socially on the internet.
I need more than that and need to be free of the social networking fakeness. I miss seeing what people are up to but so much of it is so curated or many times someone just yelling at the top of their lungs and it’s not for me.
Some people I will miss, some won’t miss me.
There’s a part of me that wants to be like a personal version of the ideal death where you leave no trace.
If my books were to survive me, then cool, but it won’t happen.
I’d love for my good deeds to outlast me, but we all know that bad deeds and misdeeds weigh more and sink deeper.
The best I can hope for is to be forgotten by all but the closest to me and to hope that those people I did as little harm as I could.
People leave though, it’s just in our nature.
The last of the things here though is the leaving of the things we love.
Not quitting cigarettes or drinking.
The real things we deeply love.
Needing to stop skateboarding because your body can’t take it any longer.
Needing to stop horseback riding because you can’t afford it.
Needing to stop whatever it is you love because you just don’t have it in you anymore.
You lost that fire.
Or you gave it away.
For me, I gave the fire away.
When I started the Flint Horror Convention in 2011 it was a strange dream, one I have talked about at length on this blog. It was the coming together of friends to pursue one goal that was beyond what I could have hoped when I started the ball rolling.
It was a dream come true.
Over the ten years I ran things we did conventions, concerts, movie festivals, movie nights, fundraisers, author events, vending events, spoken word events, and so many shows I can’t even remember them all. We did it all with our own money and with a few sponsors, and two angel investors. We did it because we loved it and loved one another.
Members of our group came and went as their lives led them here and there, but that’s the nature of things like this. It can eat up a lot of time to do these events and the older we get the less we seem to find.
It’s funny because I told my dad about leaving the group and his reply was that it was good because it had cost me a lot of money over the years. And yeah, he’s right, it did. I don’t wanna think of how much. But what I got in return is worth more than any money I would have had in its place.
Friendship.
Memories.
Laughter.
Surprise.
Far more than money can make up for easily.
That’s why we do the things we love, because they fill the empty places in our heart.
And that’s why it’s so hard to let those things go.
But sometimes you need to.
There are times when we need to recalibrate and reset ourselves.
When we need to re-discover what it is that drives us and inspires us.
Times when we have to love ourselves and our passion enough to move on.
To let go.
I am still coming to terms with walking away from the group I began eleven years ago. I had never wanted to give up the hope of us returning to doing conventions and loved doing shows with these people, but my heart has shifted, and I need to shift with it.
I need to get out of the way and let the people with passion do what they can with what we built and see where it takes them.
Sometimes you just have to step aside to let other people move on.
Even if you are stepping out of your own way to let yourself move on.
The hope will always be that the people and things we leave behind us will echo with the good we did and the love we shared and that any misdeeds will be distant rumbles of a storm that has passed.
We don’t always get what we hope, but we’ll hope for those things just the same, just as we hope that the things we walk away from, were the things we needed to walk away from in the end.
Only time knows.
…c…
The Spooky World of Chris Ringler 