Letting Go: Mourning the Right Decision

We like to think of things as simple. If we choose the right career, the bills will get paid and vacations will be possible. If we find the right life partner, the birds will sing us awake in the morning and we will fall asleep with the sounds of love and laughter in our ears.

But life is not clean and straight-lines. It isn't fluffy clouds and rainbows. And, most of all, it isn't simple.

At the deepest level, we want our decisions to be clear. We want to make the right choice and feel the rightness. We want weights to be lifted from our shoulders. We want a smile to creep across our faces with how right we were.

Right decisions should make us feel good. But they don't always. Sometimes, we are faced -  with an impossible choice and, no matter what path we choose, it won't feel good. We will still need to mourn the death of that other possibility.

I once lived in a house with a great bedroom. My bedroom had a 3/4 bath attached. My bedroom had a (non-functioning) fireplace. My bedroom had a closet under the stairs, so the ceiling - and even the closet door - had a severe angle in it. My bedroom had a broken doorknob, so I could take the doorknob with me as a kind of lock on my bedroom door.

When we moved, we moved to a farmhouse. I picked out my bedroom, which had a vent through which I could see down into the living room. Even better, I could listen to the movies and TV shows my parents watched after I went to bed. My brother and I could pack up snacks in a back pack and roam the large hills in which this new home was nestled. When the rotation was right in the summer, the mooing of cows would wake us too early and set us on our adventures. We touched electric fences, stared down bulls, climbed to the tops of the tiny mountains around us.

The choice to move was a good one. Never for one moment did I think it was the wrong choice. Yet, as we packed up to move out of my bedroom with it's angled closet, 3/4 bath, and broken doorknob, I cried.

Looking back, I see the wisdom that my 10 year old self had in that moment. Even when it's the right thing to do, you may still need to mourn the path you did not take.

I have made a decision. I have several dreams for my life. Most of them are possible to do at the same time, but I realized that dividing my time and resources as they currently are will result in neither of them being fully realized.

I have to give one of them up to let the other come to fruition.

It's the right choice that I've made. I am also pretty certain that I will eventually pick the other dream up again. In the meantime, I am sad.

I'm sad that I had to make the choice. I'm sad that I can't carry both dreams right now. I'm sad that all the work I've put into the dream left behind has been, well, left behind. I am sad, but I made the right choice.

We need to allow ourselves to give vent to the negative emotions without worrying about whether it's appropriate to HAVE those emotions. Emotions are always appropriate. Behaviors based on those emotions are a different story.

Let yourself mourn the right choice. You can be scared when you move. You can be sad when you had to cut a toxic person from your life. You can feel guilt when you can't afford to help someone out.

These feelings are okay. Feel them. Honor them. Then move on with your right choice.