By Priyanka Hardikar
Feature Image by: pixdeluxe
I wrote in my journal yesterday: “I was planning a future with someone I had no future with in the first place. I wasn’t accepting reality. I was living in a fantasy, and it was hurting only me. Even though ending the relationship hurt my heart, I felt it also set it free.” As with everything, there are two sides to this: one is the deceptive beauty in lying to yourself about what you can have one day and the second is the crushing pain in accepting the truth about what you will never have. It hurts to recognize and accept reality and it also hurts to deceive myself, day after day.
Our world is full of contradictions. Nothing is black-and-white as I once believed. As someone once shared with me, it is in the grey areas of life that we find grace.
There’s something really beautiful in keeping the dream alive, in believing that someday, you can have the life you wanted with the person you wanted to spend it with, but it’s also exhausting and emotionally draining to chase after a dream that was never yours. It’s like you walk a few steps every day for the rest of your life but you never reach the destination because it ceased to exist long ago or it never existed at all; you discover that the destination is an illusion, a mirage in your mind.
Just knowing the destination is there, even when it’s really not, can give you a false sense of hope and reality, but it can also prevent you from finding true happiness and fulfillment in the present moment. You are so preoccupied with a life you can never have that you lose the possibility of achieving the life you could have. But because there’s comfort in this false reality, you choose to hold on to it. Even if it consumes you. Even if it leaves you with nothing tangible, nothing real, nothing that you can call your own.
On the flip side, when you choose to let go, you lose the dream, you lose him, you lose the life you wanted with him, but you gain your own freedom. You gain your own future. You gain the fullness and beauty of the present moment. You gain perspective. You gain aspects of your life you had not even known you had lost. Yesterday, I read the lines, “But she was not afraid. She had the freedom of knowing he was not her future,” and I finally understood what that meant.
When holding on hurts more than letting go, we know it is time to let go of the dream. No matter how hard it is. No matter how much it hurts. No matter how much we don’t want to. But it isn’t until we finally let go of the dream that we discover what lies beyond it: grace.
Grace is unconditional love. It is the free divine assistance and love we are given, whether we deserve it or not. The beauty in grace is that it finds us when we need it the most. It helps us move past the difficult moments and to do what we may not be able to do alone.
It gives us the power to change our narrative. It gives us the power to begin again. This time with a clean slate. With the chance at finding love, life, and a future that we didn’t just conjure up in our imagination, but that we know to be real and that we know to be ours.
In a way that cannot be denied.
Try this meditation for grace and healing:
Goddess Meditation for Grace and Healing
In it, Syma Kharal said she would pray for grace and ask: “Do for me this moment what I cannot do for myself.” She said she would be given just enough grace to get through the day, moment by moment. I hope you find the grace you need today. 💖
