I was going to say “first, you kill yourself”.
But although that’s true, perhaps we shouldn’t put up something that looks like click-bait. Potentially harm-causing click-bait, at that.
Yet, how else do you move into a new incarnation, without shuffling off this mortal coil?
The reference is deliberate, because a bit like becoming a monk or nun and renouncing all worldly ties and deliberations, this is a path only you can choose to walk towards.
出家，it’s called. Or “leaving the house/home” if you look at the characters literally.
But unlike them, we leave this place in search of finding or creating a new home.
As a responsible person, before we drop ourselves into the river of forgetfulness, there are things to wrap up.
One does not simply walk away from one’s responsibilities and obligations.
Or one can and does, but one shouldn’t, not just because of morality, but because unresolved karma means whatever ties you cut now will simply grow back later. Perhaps even thicker and pricklier than before, because that is the nature of guilt and fixations.
Say your good-byes.
Aloud, to those who understand and who you might see again in your new incarnation.
Silently, to those who might not and who you may choose to leave behind.
Know here, that we all leave each other behind, because we come into this life alone and we depart it alone. There is no ill or guilt in movement; only if there is a debt incurred.
And what if there are debts?
You repay what you can, decide if the favor is big enough you shall carry it forward if you can’t currently repay what you think is fair, and we move forward.
Of those owed you…
Here is a difficult bit, out of many to come:
If it is money, ask for it back, if you are willing.
If you are not willing, then consider it travel fare or repayment for another past life or whatever is necessary to cut ties with that person.
If it is love owed you, consider how impossible it is to quantify and qualify what is love given, received, and owed, and perhaps reconcile with yourself.
Note here the same thoughts work in your favor as well, when you feel guilty over leaving behind people who have claimed to given you love before.
If what they gave you was truly love, was truly something valuable in an ongoing sense rather than a single favor (or two or three or four) performed at some point in time, then shouldn’t they be part of those said-aloud farewells?
And if not, truly think about what it means when your heart has decided not to carry these people with you into a different future.
We return to debts owed you. Or perceived debts. I say that with no ill-will, but the resigned recognition that sometimes what we give others is perhaps useless or worthless in their eyes.
Perhaps you feel your time was wasted, your labor gone unrewarded, the opportunity cost too great for you to let go.
But what is the alternative?
To continue in this life, haggling over debts that will never be repaid, sunk into misery when the ones who have taken from you drift merrily through the world?
To linger in a swamp, punishes no one but yourself.
Easy for one to say, I admit, and all but impossible to really internalize, but you must if you are to successfully end things in this lifetime.
I try to persuade myself that one does not quibble over travel fare.
So you flew first class at great expense and sacrifice, and all you got from it was arriving at a destination you don’t like, with people who you might nor might not like but who almost certainly don’t like you…
Does it make sense to stay there, in that place hostile to you, simply because you are unwilling to pay more money to leave?
The sunk cost fallacy is a hard one to see through, but one must.
Why is it so much easier to fall asleep on vacation?
My experience is because there is nothing one is supposed to do. And if something comes up, well, there is a simple (and difficult) solution: one throws money at it.
There is much less “making do” because for better or worse, it is much harder to make do away from what we call home but what is often a cage instead.
The roof that needs fixing, the walls that are molding from the inside, the endless to-do list…
All of that is very distant when you are in a hotel somewhere a million miles away.
Here, we shall try to recreate a little bit of that.
“With what money, katja?” you ask.
Within the universe of yourself, where you are omnipotent and omnipresent, all this requires no currency of this world.
So pay what debts you can, pay forward what you can, say your farewells, and let us quietly, simply, walk into the river of forgetfulness.
Leave this house behind, so we can create a new home somewhere else.
Somewhere home.