Italian
“Let it go, you’ll see it will pass. After the night, the day always comes.” We repeat this to ourselves like a comforting mantra in the face of life’s difficulties, from the small daily grievances to the most painful losses. The common invitation is always the same: forget to move forward, let misfortunes slide off before they hurt us.
It seems like wise advice, even obvious. But it’s not because we are not made that way.
We are not designed to forget or to let pain pass through us without being hurt. The recipe for forgetting and moving on doesn’t work, especially when the adversity is an irreparable loss, like the death of a child or a loved one. That pain never leaves us, despite external pressures to turn the page.
Years ago, during a visit to Brindisi — the historic port from which the crusaders embarked for the East — I was moved to see what those pilgrim soldiers left in the churches before their journey of no return: the entirety of their possessions, in a radical adherence to the evangelical invitation to leave everything and follow me. Years later, in a residence in Haute-Savoie in Briançon, a mandatory stop for the Northern crusaders, I noticed another phrase from the Gospel engraved on the doorframe: seek and you will find.
It is precisely in that “searching” that the answer to pain lies, not in “letting go.” Rainer Maria Rilke, in his Requiem for a Friend, captures that sense of guilt and helplessness that overwhelms us in the face of death when he writes: “They are dead, and we have let them go.” But shortly after, the poet rebels against this passive surrender and poses the only truly human question: “What must I do? Should I perhaps come to seek you?”
The cross we bear is exclusively our own; it is not a generic gallows on which to place another condemned person. To face and overcome adversity
there’s no need to forget. It is necessary to set out on a journey, to go and seek. Because only by searching can one find what has been lost forever — perhaps in a different form, but which will continue to gently inhabit our present.
