Get Over It

Perhaps the most important three words in the English language should be “Get over it”.

Beginnings are easy, but endings are not.

Learning how to deal with closure and moving on is the mark of an advanced soul. A young soul will focus on revenge; holding on; attachment; undermining and bad-mouthing; the failure to let something that is past be released.

In the 2009 show Damages, a brilliantly-scripted show where every person lied, deceived, stole from others, lacked transparency, schemed with negative agendas, and where truth was never revealed, the most telling line was made by the youngest person in the show:

A 17-year-old tells his mother (a rich and powerful lawyer who was seeking revenge against the father who had betrayed her): “get over it”.

Good advice from a young person-old soul to an older person-young soul.

“Betrayal” is often the first word that is uttered by someone who has been left behind. Those doing the leaving use different words: “breaking free”.

We keep going around and around until we let go. Remember the words from Dark:

Everything repeats itself, again and again for all eternity

Because none of us are prepared to let go of the past.

The Beginning is the End

And the End is the Beginning.

How can we move forwards, learn, develop, experience new things, if we are always holding on to the past? Or being dragged down by the weight of other people’s emotions?

As Kafka said in The Trial:

From a certain point onwards, there is no turning back; that is the point that must be reached.

Reaching the point where we are free of all weight, where we are ‘light’ – that is the goal. This is the point of escape velocity, where there is no return.

The journalist Duncan Fallowell put it well in How to Disappear (2011):

What was that about nostalgia and melancholy being forms of love? They are forms of paralysis! The sense of loss – enough of it! Let the pull of the past be succeeded by the pull of the future and the sense of loss replaced by the sense of expectancy.

The mystic Richard Rose described ‘love’ perfectly in After the Absolute, David Gold’s 2002 book on Rose’s life. He said:

We may believe someone loves us, but if we live long enough we’ll discover that they really only love that which we can give them. Everybody wants desperately to believe in love, though, because we’re so lonely.

The way out of loneliness is to find ourselves, the Absolute. There is no loneliness there.

We spend so much time waiting. How much waiting becomes too long? And waiting for what? Love, success, an answer, a response, a phone call, a change….time is short. We can change. Don’t miss that “cubic centimetre of chance” that Carlos Castaneda talks about.

As was said in the post-apocalyptic show Station Eleven:

There is no before.

Only what is to come.

So here is the answer: Get over it.

30 November 2024