This year is my 19th working in the current organisation and my 24th working with people from around the world who have chosen to include Romania in their journey, for just a little while. This means that for the past 24 years I have been exercising my heart muscle into tens of goodbyes and hellos. You would think that by now things are easier and the muscle is accustomed and ready to go through the motions …
This week I said goodbye to one of my life’s giants. Of course, we vouched to see each other soon but life is that way that you never really know. And living in the present, as I have vouched to do a while ago, I am not able to find comfort in an uncertain future.
I am richer for having walked the path alongside this gentleman for the past five years and this goodbye finds me quite a different person than he encountered when he joined. As life would have it, as we walked the path together the stumbles have been great and the joys miraculous. We made a good team.
Working in a multinational organization, goodbyes and hellos often overlap, there is no real time for any kind of regrouping. No in between to lick our wounds of the parting and get our being ready for opening the path to someone else. It’s tough. And it gets tougher by the year. The muscle of the heart never really gets accustomed to this if you make it a point to keep the heart open. And the thing is, life only really happens if you keep your heart open. Any other scenario is to me a kind of death that I am not willing to take on before the actual one knocks on my door.
So I turn my face from looking back and waving goodbye, I wipe my tears of grief earlier than they would have dried, I look in front of me, smile, reach out my hand and say hello. Eyes and heart wide open, ready to walk on, alongside someone else, and asking the Universe that at the end of the journey I will feel richer still.
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