“The snake does not hate its old skin. It simply knows it cannot grow inside it.” — Unknown
I think sometimes we make moving on from something more complicated than it needs to be because we feel like we have to find something wrong with it first. If we’re going to leave a job, change a relationship, walk away from a friendship, abandon an old routine, or even change the way we’ve been living, we almost feel like we need to build a case for why. Something must have gone wrong. Someone must have disappointed us. The situation must have become bad enough to justify leaving it behind. But what if nothing went wrong at all?
That’s what I like about this quote. A snake doesn’t shed its skin because there was something wrong with the old one. That skin did exactly what it was supposed to do. It protected the snake while it grew, matching its shape perfectly, until it didn’t. Then the snake grew some more, and eventually the skin that once protected it became too small for the animal it had become.
I think we go through versions of that ourselves. There are things in our lives that may have been exactly what we needed at one point: certain people, routines, environments, beliefs, relationships, and even certain versions of ourselves. They may have helped us get somewhere, taught us something, given us structure, or carried us through a period of our lives when we needed them. That doesn’t mean they’re supposed to come with us forever.
Maybe that’s where we sometimes get stuck, thinking that appreciating what something gave us means we have to keep holding onto it, or that deciding we’ve outgrown something somehow invalidates everything that came before it. It doesn’t. We can be grateful for what something was and still recognize that it isn’t what we need anymore. We can appreciate the people we used to be without needing to remain those people. We can acknowledge that something was good for us then while also realizing it may be limiting us now.
Not every chapter has to end badly for it to be time to turn the page. Sometimes nothing is broken, nothing failed, nobody needs to be blamed.
Sometimes we just grew.
Maybe the question isn’t always what’s wrong with this, but whether this still fits who we’re becoming, because there comes a point when holding onto something simply because it once served us can become the very thing that keeps us from growing beyond it. The snake doesn’t shed its old skin because something’s wrong with it. It sheds because the snake keeps growing.
#MotivationMonday
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