Breaking Up Is Hard To DoSometimes things just don’t work out. In personal relationships or business ones, stuff happens, breaking up ensues. Nobody’s fault. Some things are just not meant to be. As Neil Sedaka used to croon to hyper-emotional teeny-boppers (like me, way back when), “Breaking up is hard to do.” The phrase itself implies damage or destruction, perhaps too dramatic for most situations. He had something right though. Even when it isn’t tumultuous, a breakup is always hard because it changes things. Scientists say that nature abhors a vacuum. So do people. When someone leaves a team or an office or a family, the vacuum needs filling. Either a new person must be added or the group must stretch and spread out to fill the space. Jobs undone must be redistributed and possibly learned or re-learned. One hopes that the broken bond adds strength to those remaining and builds character and confidence. Every action that we perform adds to us for better or worse. Every person with whom we interact adds an invisible layer to our existence. The mere passage of time spent with an individual alters those hours from what they would have been without them. Neither the time nor the individual can be erased from our history. Nor would we want to. When people join together to work or socialize, they sometimes fall prey to another hippy-dippy expression from my youth, “What you see is what you get.” If that were only so. I wish that I could always be the confident, competent optimist that I attempt to present to the world. And I wish that there were no mysteries hidden behind the smiles and assurances of my associates and friends. I try to live by the phrase, “What is, is.” If that is true, then converting it to the past tense is also true. “What was, was.” But memory is an elusive abstract phenomenon. My sisters sometimes baffle me with their skewed perceptions of my childhood memories! “What are you talking about?’ I exclaim when they inaccurately describe Christmases or birthdays or family battles that never happened that way. “What is wrong with you people?” I bellow inside my head. And these are people with whom I share DNA! Why should I expect otherwise from acquaintances and coworkers, human beings all? We’re all people here, not Stepford Friends whom I have crafted to fill my own needs. When differences occur, though I may be naively shocked, I have learned that sometimes it’s necessary to let go. When that happens, I imagine Neil Sedaka, now a ripe old sixty-something balding guy, singing the reprise, “Breaking up can be so, oh so very ha-rd to do.” Patty Writes About Life, Too |