When You Have to Let Go . . .

To live life properly, two things are essential to understand: when to hold on, when to let go. If you can maintain the balance between these two in life, life won't be too bad.
 
When we live believing in eternal bliss in some heaven after death or endless suffering in hell—whatever we do in our living state to attain that heavenly happiness after death, we actually receive that very happiness before death itself. On this journey from pre-death to post-death life, we must understand very clearly—when, where, how, and from which attachments it's time to break free. Attachment is the root of all destruction.
 
To survive, you need to know far more about letting go than about holding on. When holding onto something makes your own life meaningless, it's better to release it immediately. Good and evil, love and hatred, forgiveness and revenge—life is the coexistence of such contradictory forces. If we don't understand our responsibilities toward ourselves and others, unnecessary troubles crowd into our lives, bringing only pain.
 
If we let go of something that we absolutely shouldn't have released, it torments us greatly. If we hold onto something that we should have let go of to survive, it sometimes destroys us completely. What we hold onto, what we release—this depends on two things: what we prioritize and what decision we make about it. Whatever our decision may be, if we have the strength to remain steadfast in that decision until the end, we don't suffer much harm.
 
No matter how difficult it gets, accepting everything...mastering this sense of timing—when to let go or when to hold on—is quite challenging. Sometimes it takes a lifetime to learn this art. Life once asked Death, "Why do people love me and hate you?" Death smiled and replied, "Because people see you through the enchanting magic of beautiful lies, while they see me as a painful truth."
To understand what happiness is, one first needs the invocation of infinite sorrow. To reduce pain, you must increase pain; the search for comfort is found by diving deep into the vast ocean of discomfort. One who doesn't know clamor can never recognize silence. One of life's most difficult tasks is letting something go. Whether it's love or hatred, anger or hurt feelings, gain or loss, friend or enemy, work or laziness—change is not such a simple matter.
 
To hold onto something, to let it go—in both cases we must wage war with ourselves. Even after many days, perhaps only one regret will remain in our minds: Alas! What I held onto so tightly all this time was never really mine!