Lessons from a Geisha, letting go

LESSONS FROM A GEISHA
1.1 I always thought it sad that I could be with someone, think that I love them and then afterwards not ever be able to talk to them again, as if that love had been a lie. After reading “Memoirs of a Geisha” by Arthur Goldman I was introduced to another way of looking at relationship and life. In this excerpt, Sayori, the Geisha of the title, is telling us about the man she loved:
1.1.1 “… an elderly man who was explaining to me that his wife, whom he’d cared for deeply, wasn’t really dead because the pleasure of their time together lived on inside him… I understood that he left me at the end of his long life just as naturally as the leaves fall from the trees. Even now that he is gone I have him still, in the richness of my memories. I’ve lived my life again just telling it to you.”
1.2 I understood this to mean that there is nothing to fear in letting go because we’re not really letting go. The people who leave us become a part of us as we become a part of them. The experience of people we love just moves from the world outside of us to the world that is inside. Helping us to experience love.
1.3 And perhaps in love it doesn’t matter that one day we may have to say goodbye, what matters is that we are with the person while we are with them, being grateful, enjoying the journey as well as “getting there.”
1.4 And getting there, somewhere, then we get a chance to look back at our trip, to enjoy it in retrospect, make it a part of us and then, perhaps after a rest, it’s time for a new journey, with the same partner or a different one but being with whoever we are with.
1.5 I realized that as much as we look out and recognize who and what is around us, as much as we experience life across space, part of life is taking what we experience within and looking back at it across the span of time.
1.6 Expanding across time we get another look at our lives the way Sayori did by looking back at her life with the man that she loved... And it’s the way I interpreted what my friend taught me about sorrow. In sorrow we look back across time and recognize the efforts of the people who have affected us directly or indirectly. Sorrow, looking back so that we can learn, and make those learnings a part of us. But we don’t need sorrow to go within, it’s just one of the ways of getting there. Perhaps it’s a signal that we haven’t looked within in a long time.
1.7 Going inwards we can recognize the parts of our body. But then we can go inwards deeper still. We can pull in from all that is around us. We pull inwards from space, and we expand outwards across time.
1.8 Going within and seeing back across time we can see where we’ve been and enjoy it from another point of view.
1.9 And this is another aspect of rhythm, taking turns to expand across space, being present, and then across time, being nothing.
1.10 Looking back we get to experience life again, but from another viewpoint, across time instead of space. We see ourselves and our experiences from another point of view and just as our view is transformed so do we ourselves become transformed. Looking back, it’s as if each experience is a chance for us to learn ourselves, a chance for us to better know the idea of ourselves, a chance for us to grow.