Moving On vs. Moving Forward: Letting Time Heal.

I have these flies in my house. They are actually becoming kind of a big problem.

They are called “cluster flies” according to my extra-thorough Google search on this issue. They lay eggs when it’s nice out, then when it gets cold like it is now in the winter months, they hatch and buzz around and cause issues.

So, I’ve been doing pretty much everything trying to get rid of them. I’ve got these sticky traps hanging from my living room, kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom. I keep walking into them, trapping myself but not trapping flies. I can hear them buzzing, and it is testing my sanity.

Sometimes, when all the lights are off at night, and I only have the one candle in my room lit, they find and terrorize me. I’ve had 2 a.m. nights of walking around with fly swatters, tracking down the buzzing with my dog watching me like I’ve lost it for real this time.

There’s a metaphor here, I swear.

I’ve noticed recently that many of us are struggling to move on from something in our lives. We are getting stuck. We are hearing a buzzing in our heads all day long that we can’t shut off. This buzzing could be a person, an event, a job, a fly, anything really. A phrase that I keep hearing around this subject is, “Time can heal anything.” Many people have said it to me before and I’ve often caught myself saying it as well.

I do believe that time can heal anything. But it is an interesting phrase to be connected to moving on. Moving on is an action, a verb, something that you have to do consciously. And I think when we are trying to get over something, we can’t just decide to move on and that’s it. I believe it does take time, and changing the way we perceive and talk about it can help in this scenario.

Instead of moving on, I have decided I will be moving forward. Regardless of whether we are over this thing or not, time is going to keep moving forward.

When we decide to simply live our lives and move forward, then we don’t have to focus so much on getting over something.

The rhetoric surrounding this is significant. Words have meaning, and they shape how we view the world around us.

Life is hard. No one said it would be easy. People will break your heart and betray you. And you’ll do the same to people you thought you never could do that to.

Some of those things will stick with you. They will burrow deep inside of you and hatch when you least expect it. They will follow you around, run circles around you while you shop for groceries at Walmart, twist into when you watch action movies on Sundays, and maybe even find you late at night when all your lights are off and you think you are alone in your bedroom with your sole candle. And you may or may not move on from them. But you will move forward.

Sometimes, the only thing you can do is focus on the clock ticking on. I have a friend who just turned 90 this year. His secret to staying healthy is: “just keep moving.” He says, “When you stop moving, you stop living.”

And there will be days when it will feel like it just happened. Focusing on moving forward will put us in the right mindset. Because by doing this, we eventually do move on, and we get to decide. We make a choice that we no longer want to live in this negativity we are perpetuating. Sometimes, the right thing to do is give up and give in to time, as sad as that sounds. Giving up on toxic relationships, jobs, and friendships does not make you a bad person.

I once read that all of life is a feeling.

So, what if we can decide that feeling? And decide that instead of feeling anxious, and rushing ourselves stressing over trying to move on and get to the next step of our lives, we decide to just let life happen. This way, the forced process of moving on will come naturally with time, instead.

It’s all just words at the end of the day. But the words we say to others and to ourselves are ultimately what make us who we are. Maybe I’ll move on eventually, and maybe I’ll get rid of these darn cluster flies for good one day. Who’s to say? But we can all be certain about one thing. Life will keep going and continue to throw new things at us. All we can do in the meantime is let the time we are given heal us, no matter how long it takes.

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