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Growing up, I cried every time I came home from a holiday. Not tears of joy, whatever that saying promises you. I was upset. I missed the place I had just left, and I didn't want it to end. Coming home meant going back to the mundane. The world doesn't stop spinning while you sit in your sorrow. As brutal as that sounds, life carries on regardless, and eventually you have to let go and move with it.
Letting go is never easy. It comes with a bittersweet ending, especially when the thing you're releasing holds real value or sentiment. Some endings are forced on us — death is the clearest example. Others we choose ourselves, with open eyes.
I loved working with children across multiple schools. In one of my earlier careers, I taught life skills, character, and values as part of a pilot programme, with teachers facilitating alongside me. Children are the most receptive audience you will ever have. They listen. And they remember, long after most adults would have forgotten.
I ended that work when I moved into a new chapter of my life. I handed over my responsibilities so the programme could keep running without me. Even without that transition, the ending was always coming. My placement in those schools was temporary by design, not by accident.
Stepping away was easier because I trusted it would stay in good hands. But underneath that, I knew something else: holding onto something I loved, at the cost of others getting to experience it, would have been selfish. I couldn't pass it on and keep hold of it at the same time.
That's the part people don't like to admit. Loving something isn't always reason enough to keep it. And staying, when you already know your season is over, isn't devotion. It's often just fear, wearing a nicer name.
Sometimes you have to let go, loosely if not completely, so someone else can carry it forward.
What have you held onto past its season? What would it cost you to finally let it go?
