Take the Time You Need to Start Over

Thinking that we have the future in our hands is a double-edged sword: on one hand, it gives us security and vitality, but on the other, it can create a huge gap. Starting over involves closing circles and letting them go, because something didn’t go well, and it may have even been painful.

Starting over  is becoming aware of something that needs to change in your life, becoming aware that you have to heal your wounds so that you can look at the future with new eyes.

It’s likely that you, like everyone eventually does, have had to stop your life short to give yourself another chance to be happy. You’ll see yourself circling aimlessly around the same memory, aware that you have to get out of it, but not knowing how. You’ll know that you have to take your time, and this depends on a lot of factors.

You can’t start over without being prepared

Timing is fundamental, like we’ve said, in situations in which we feel lost, because that’s the only way we can rebuild our principles. From the moment we realize that we have to start over, we’ll notice that something has changed inside of us, and we’re not the same anymore: we must get to know ourselves again.

Knowing who we are after suffering from emotional blocks is necessary to build relationships with new people, develop ourselves in any area of life, or simply to be happy with what we do.

Not giving ourselves adequate time for it is one of the most common mistakes that we make. We’re ready to start over even when the damage might not have been completely repaired.

Not giving yourself enough time could lead to regression

Being prepared is something that takes time. And the amount of time it takes is relative: there is no rule for it. The only rule there could be depends on the degree of internal loss, suffering, will, and strength, among other things. Everybody is different, and our ability to face different situations is different from everyone else’s.

What is certain is that, like with any process, starting over has its guidelines, and if you don’t follow them, you could end up regressing. Sometimes, we think that we’re prepared to face a new beginning, when reality arrives and washes over us completely. This is its way of telling us that we made a mistake and that there’s still a lot to do.

A huge effort will be rewarded

This process has its ups and downs and involves one of the biggest efforts we’ll ever have to make in life. Not looking back is difficult, accepting something that we don’t understand is difficult, learning to exist without something that we used to count on is heartbreaking, and seeing someone leave our lives too early is overwhelming.

However, starting over teaches us many other things that we didn’t know before that can help us grow. The effort that we have to make when we go through something like this ends up transforming it into a positive reward that can fill us with experience and happiness.

Finally, through a lot of sacrifice, we’ll feel emotionally free and whole. We’ll understand what we lived through and we’ll have learned to live in the present with what we have. We’ll be able to live our lives based on the new principles that we reconstructed. It will be a new start after a stage in your life that was ready to end.

Images courtesy of Christian Schloe