Hello or Goodbye?

After viewing the closing musical performance of the final Late Night show, featuring Stephen Colbert and Sir Paul McCartney, lyrics from Hello, Goodbye kept playing through my mind:

“You say, ‘Goodbye’ and I say, ‘Hello, hello, hello.’ I don’t know why you say, ‘Goodbye’, I say, ‘Hello, hello, hello.’”

― Paul McCartney, John Lennon

Watching the performance, it felt like Colbert had already processed much of his “goodbye” from the cancellation of The Late Show and was moving into the joy of “hello” and all its possibilities. Posted comments suggest many fans are understandably still in anger, resistance, and sorrow about an unexpected goodbye.

We’re often navigating the transition from goodbye to hello in some aspect of our lives. Of course we thrive when we can get ourselves gracefully from goodbye to hello when it’s clearly time to move on. But that doesn’t always happen, so patience, kindness, and compassion become ways to gently move ourselves and others along.

“Thank God I found the GOOD in goodbye.”

― Beyonce Knowles

Where in your life are you on the journey from goodbye to hello? Is there something that is changing that you need to honor with a goodbye, so you can truly welcome in the new beginnings found in hello?

May you be blessed with the compassion to accept wherever you are on the journey from goodbye to hello in your life .

“Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it’s less good than the one you had before. You can fight it, you can do nothing but scream about what you’ve lost, or you can accept that and try to put together something that’s good.”

—Elizabeth Edwards

For A New Beginning

(or a “Hello”)

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

―John O’Donohue,To Bless the Space Between Us