After great tragedies, catastrophes or emotionally impactful events, the time for starting over arrives. Starting over does not mean beginning from scratch, but picking up from the point where we stopped. In this restart, at times, we feel disoriented, unable to identify, in the confusion of the moment, where to start from and where to go. We are hurt, sensitive, and emotion takes over. Plans and actions seem impossible, as if out of reach.

I have been watching several videos about letting go of material things, because they are transitory, and I think about how complex that is. We attach value to material things, and I am not speaking only of the objects, but of all the memories and meanings that surround them.

A house is not just a residence; it is someone’s safe place, the assurance of having somewhere to go at the end of the day. It was a place built or acquired with effort, work and hard decisions made for the sake of that achievement, and it means much more than the property itself.

That special gift, given by an important person who was always nearby taking care of everything and everyone, who always offered a lap or a loving, encouraging word, represents all the memories and special moments alongside that person.

Part of my family lives in Rio Grande do Sul, which allowed me to follow the recent great tragedy up close. When I visited them to start the cleanup effort, I came face to face with the reality of rebuilding after the water went down.

Significant objects, dismantled, covered in mud, broken, lost in moments of catastrophe, are piled up by the force of wind or water, or even after a selection of what stays and what goes. These piles may be just trash to those who do not know how to recognize them or were not marked by them.

But, individually, each object in that pile has a meaning, a story, a memory, an immeasurable value. From that perspective, yes, it is hard to let go.

Something important to remember is that, if these objects have emotional value, they marked us in some way and, regardless of their physical existence, the story and the emotional memory will be with us forever. From here on, new memories will be built from the stories lived.

Some things we are determined to give back to the flood or the storm, because they no longer fit in our lives and our spaces. Those are much easier to let go of.

When emotionally impactful events occur in our lives, I imagine similar processes happening inside us. An outside event occurs and unsettles us from within, takes away our foundation, makes us feel lost or without ground. After the event “settles,” we need to start over: clean out what needs cleaning inside ourselves, find parts of us that seem lost, reassemble them giving them new meanings and shapes, and decide that some things inside us simply need to be abandoned, so that new events or people can come to us, creating new possibilities for the empty spaces.

At first, all of this may seem impossible but, little by little, the pieces fit together, take shape and present us with new gains, new forms, previously unknown.

At times we are forced to choose new paths, but we are able to make those decisions and move forward only because all of this has made us stronger.