When I started writing this, my first thought was this was going to be a love letter to Hays County. Almost four months ago I packed my bags and said goodbye to a community that, for nine years, heavily shaped who I am today. When I first moved to Hays County it was to attend Texas State University. Not only did the campus community help me grow as a person in addition, the larger community embraced me. I volunteered, redeveloped my faith and even grew my voice politically. The county line felt like a treasured point for me, one where Hays County was my place. With a packed car I drove to my new place crying, about the place I was leaving behind to start the next adventure. I started reflecting on what Hays County was as a place and how it was also my home.
When I said goodbye to Hays County, it meant physically moving to a new space; leaving the little spot on a map that was so sacred for me, to get to the next path of my journey. This land that for generations has been impacting the lives of people who inhabit it and the ones that have not come yet, also impacted me. It is saying goodbye to the river, the running trails and the nature hiking spots.
It is also a goodbye to the ones that helped me grow by allowing me to learn lessons, mentoring me, giving guidance when needed, and to allowing me a space to grow. A community is supposed to embrace you unconditionally as yourself and then it is there for you to teach you how to mature and be a better version of yourself because of feedback. This is what the Hays County community did for me. This has been the hardest part of the goodbye is not having the community physically with me every day.
Upon moving into my new place I have had to say a more permanent or final “goodbye” to two important people in my life. The first was one of the high school dance team directors and then my childhood friend of 17 years. With all of the goodbyes I have faced, I have been reflecting on the power of the word goodbye. I had a deep friendship with my childhood friend which included regular phone calls every Sunday. These calls stopped without an ending, and there were words still left without everything said. These goodbyes are painful and we do not know when they will show up; a longing to say the unsaid that will never be. We often say “I wish I said, or they meant so much to me but I didn’t make that known enough”. It is not until the death of the loved one that we reflect on this, and instead what if we make the commitment to what we want to say in the now and not what we say when it’s too late.
The final area of goodbyes are the ones that we prepare for every year. It's what we clean out of the things that we do not want in our life. We are all starting this right now. This is the one people want, the advertisements tell us to say goodbye to the extra weight of the items that are holding us back, either physical items or emotional ones. This is the set of goodbyes we often love and as we end the year it is the one that we find ourselves wanting to do. If we clean out the drama, the stuff and the weight we will have the intentional life that we want.
As I close this time frame in my life of goodbyes I challenge us to think about what we can do in the now. The now will not mean the future goodbye won’t be less hard but it will leave the pain to be less. There will be less stones unturned and fewer conversations missed and maybe that 5 extra minutes of time with a person is worth getting rid of the extra clutter keeping you from that authentic life you want. I used to think of them as separate but really it is an interconnected web, one where the things that hold us back also keep us from being authentically who we are meant to be. Sometimes however the great adventure like my move to Hays County nine years ago was the hello I needed to become that Catherine.
Comments