Dare #3 Dare to Leave
Should I stay or should I go?
Apply this question to an area of your life and it can be stressful! Should I stay in a relationship? Should I stay in my job? Should I stay and talk longer or go?
Staying or leaving. Each has consequences.
There have been times in my life when leaving has been the best thing I’ve ever done. I’m not talking about running away. I’m talking about taking a calculated, educated, intentional step to leave a situation, place or person.
One of my first biggies was as a seventeen year old girl. I’d been in love with a boy since I was eleven. I was obsessed with him, as only a young girl can be. I remember once writing his name 1000 times on the front of my Social Studies text book.
In Year Eight he finally asked me out and so began the beginning of my first long term relationship. We went out until half-way through Year Twelve when I made the decision to leave. The reasons were wrapped up in me deciding to change the direction of my life. He drank a lot, wanted to party and took life very lightly. I was an idealistic, serious, sober and ambitious person. I could see that the road ahead with this man would be fraught with problems.
I still loved him and the hardest thing for me to do was to tell him I couldn’t see him any more.
‘But you love me. I know you do,’ he told me when I blurted out that I wanted to break up, totally out of the blue one day.
‘I do. That’s true, but we aren’t good for each other.’
He cried. I cried. He left and that that was that.
I grieved over the decision for six months, maybe longer, but life went on.
Skip forward a few years later and I’d just become engaged to the man I would marry. I stopped at a red light and looked across at the car next to me. There was the boy I’d left, waving at me to pull around the corner.
As I got out my car, my heart pounded. He was as good looking as I remembered. His cheeky smile beamed at me as he approached with arms outstretched to give me a hug.
We chatted. He told me he was still working in the same job. Living in the same area. Still drinking at the same pub every night.
I told him I’d moved away, working as a teacher, engaged the week before.
He invited my fiancé and I to have a drink with him one night. I knew that would never happen. My fiancé didn’t drink and I did not want these two worlds to collide!
We hugged and said goodbye. It was a sweet encounter. No bitterness. Maybe a tug at the heart with a smidge of regret.
As I contemplated this encounter, I wondered, had God engineered this moment? Did the universe want to let me know that I had made the right choice in leaving all those years ago? I felt that was so.
Leaving was one of the most difficult decisions I made as a young woman, but in the end it was the best.
There have been other times I’ve chosen to leave, but this choice made as a young girl, helped me to learn that making the tough choices has its reward. Even though you may feel like it’s killing you at the time, if you know in your heart it’s the right time to leave— it’s time to leave.
Stay or go? It’s a tough choice.
There are times when the actual experience of leaving something makes you wish desperately that you could stay,
and then there are times when the leaving reminds you a hundred times over
why exactly you had to leave in the first place.
Shauna Niequist
#365adventure is a book lover’s year of adventures. Adventures in travel, friendship, family, soul, heart and, of course, book stores!
