Learning To Let Go: By Diran Avagyan

Have you heard about empty nest syndrome? As my son just left home to go to college, I feel like I am experiencing it right now, perhaps not in full force, but certainly enough to leave me with mixed feelings of pride and joy, as well as anxiety and sadness.

If you have grown children who have left the family home for school, work, marriage, or other reasons, you may resonate with these feelings.

I probably should have seen this coming. Maybe I was simply not ready to accept that it could happen to me. But, as they say, there is a first time for everything.

This feeling first became real during the three-day New Student Orientation, when my wife and I helped set up our son’s room, participated in workshops, and attended various events for students and parents. One presentation in particular, much anticipated by parents, was called “Learning to Let Go.” Among other things, it addressed the ambivalence both parents and students experience during this transition: the excitement and possibilities that lie ahead, but also the concerns, uncertainties, and fears that accompany them.

The most powerful experience of the orientation, however, was the “Goodbye Blessing” ceremony. Parents and students were given an opportunity to write and exchange letters, stand together in prayer, and finally say goodbye with tears and hugs.

That was the true “letting go” moment, and I realized that letting go is not a single moment or decision. It is a learning process, and learning takes time.

Kahlil Gibran, in “The Prophet,” beautifully reflects on this mystery of parenthood:

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.

As Gibran puts it so beautifully, the arrow cannot be sent forth without the bending of the bow. Perhaps part of loving our children is accepting this “bending” so that the arrows may soar toward the infinite.

As our children grow, there comes a time when we have to loosen our grip and entrust them to God. Perhaps this is the deeper meaning of letting go: not loving less, but learning to love differently, replacing some of our control with trust, our worry with prayer, and our physical presence with spiritual closeness. And perhaps then the “empty nest” is not truly empty, but remains full of love, gratitude, memories, and prayer.

So, to all parents who are learning to let go, including myself, may God give us the grace to do so with faith and gratitude.

May our children be safe wherever they may be, near or far. May physical distance be compensated by spiritual closeness. May our hearts remain so full that we do not look upon the “empty nest” only with grief, but also with gratitude.

And may we remember that perhaps the nest was never meant to remain full forever. We built it so that one day our children would be ready to leave it and begin weaving nests of their own.