The Art of Goodbye

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“A pain stabbed my heart as it did everytime I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too big world.”

— Jack Kerouac, On the Road

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I first began writing for Held In The Heart in July of 2019. Beth was my first ever yoga teacher in Los Angeles and though she had relocated, we had kept in touch through social media. At the time, I took it upon myself to go through a weekly practice of the yamas and niyamas, principles of the yoga practice. Each week I would pick one to focus on and see how I could bring that intention to my everyday life. I’d conclude the week with my typical time-lapse meditation video on Instagram and a small write up of my successes and failures in the practice. My guess is that Beth saw something in this writing that might be trying to get out. She offered me the opportunity to write a monthly article here.

The idea was simple enough. I would call my column ‘Something I’ve Been Sitting With.’ It was a nod to my meditation practice of sitting still for extensive amounts  of time and letting things pass as they would. As you can imagine, many thoughts will race around your head during a ten, fifteen and, sometimes on special occasions, even seventy-five minute meditation session. I would take what I could from these sits and weave them into some sort of coherent rambling on whatever it was that grabbed my attention most that month.

My first article was not very well written.

I look back at it now and cringe just a bit. To be fair, I hadn’t really written anything of length since my papers in college, so I don’t really know what I was expecting. The theme, however, was something that I was excited about. I referenced The Matrix, as I am prone to reference movies and books in my writing, as a way of calling in yourself as ‘the one.’ I tried my best to balance the thought of how important you are in the grand scheme of things with the reality of how small we are in this big wide world. That’s certainly a balance that I continually try to strike now three years later.

I think Beth was happy with the article, but she did challenge me to go deeper. That had been an introduction to my column but now as we got the formalities out of the way, she wanted to see what I would bring from my practice to the paper. I do not think that I disappointed her because in my second ever article, I aired out all of my dirty laundry. I had been struggling with a break-up and trying every single little thing that I could do to get over the hump and no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t get there. The article highlighted these struggles and made note that even as a teacher and writer in these practices, I was also a student with his own challenges and issues to be faced every day.

To date, it is the article that I got the most feedback on. Friends from my past reached out to make sure I was doing alright. Even the woman who I quickly referenced heard through the grapevine and reached out with some words to me. That lesson had not been learned yet, but I’ve never claimed to be a particularly fast learner.

From there, articles seemed to flow seamlessly. I could talk about the practice of zen, meditation with eyes open, and even my drinking and drug use as it related to these more virtuous endeavors I had taken on. The climate of the world (and oh what a climate it has been) offered me opportunities to speak about being alone in a quarantine, racial injustice and trying to understand my privilege as a white male, even the Olympic games and holidays I wasn’t sure I should be celebrating. My column became an incredible outlet for me to process my emotions. All of my emotions.

After about eighteen months of writing articles, I thought that I might create something more substantial so I began the process of writing my first book, Kinda Spiritual. It wasn’t an easy task. I struggled through debates on what I really wanted to say in each chapter. I became incredibly self conscious of what I would be revealing to the world. I was hit with imposter syndrome every single time I sat down at my desk to write and didn’t produce gold. But I was always able to use these articles for guidance. I may not be able to write a book, but I could churn out two quick pages of pseudo-philosophy and spirituality as I had each month for almost two years. Then I’d remind myself that the book itself was just a fleshing out of those ideas. I was simply packing articles together into a bundle.

Without my column, I’d never have written a book. Without my column, I’d never have opened up about my sexuality as a what I’ve termed as “open” but may be better understood as bisexual man. Without my column, I’m not sure how I would have gotten through those early months of COVID where it looked like I would lose my business and my livelihood. Without my column, I don’t know how I would have processed some of the big successes and failures that have created three years worth of my life.

So why am I walking away?

The answer, like most, is simple. It’s just not easy.

I’ve lost the spark. This will be the first article that I deliver on time since I can’t remember when. Though Beth, ever the understanding editor, has told me not to worry about it, I do. You see, this column is incredibly important to me. I hope the ramblings above have shown that. And in the past couple of months, it's begun to get very difficult to put something out there that maintains the standards that I want to uphold. I’ve had full articles written that I just couldn’t submit. They got scrapped in favor of one that I wrote in a fever-pitched surge of inspiration and sent out eight days late. So while it feels great to get something to the printer, so to speak, it also feels terrible to be missing my deadlines. It feels awful to not be able to produce as I said I would.

Sometimes when you’re not feeling good about the situation you’re in, it's best to step back from it. It's best to step so far away from it that you can take a peek from a bird’s eye view as the unbiased observer. When I stepped back from my column to see what the issue was, I saw my business. In the past three years I’ve gone from what I would jokingly call my lemonade stand, to a legitimate physical therapy operation in which I may see thirty individual clients in a week. I leave my house at six thirty and sometimes do not return until past seven. A friend put it best when he said, ‘You’ve just been busy watering other plants in your garden.’

That’s why I began this farewell column with the quote about beautiful women. I have loved this column for three years and it has loved me back. It’s an absolutely heartbreaking thing to let her go. To take the road on the left as she forks to the right splits me in two, but the fact remains that I cannot walk both roads at the same time. It would not be fair to her, nor would it be fair to me. It is not to say that our roads will never meet again. Paths curve this way and that. No man truly knows what the future holds. But for now I have to say goodbye. So it is with clear eyes and a bright smile that I thank you all for coming on this journey with me. If any of my articles have touched you or supported you in any way, please let me know. I hope that you will know how much the writing of them has helped me.

And as is my way, I’ll close with a follow up to our original quote and a variation to my original sign off —

‘What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain til you see their specks dispersing? It’s the too huge world vaulting us, and its goodbye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.’ — Jack Kerouac, On the Road

It’s been an honor to have you sit with me.

— Kevin

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