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Rebellious Thoughts #72 - 🤘 The Long Good Bye

Rebellious Thoughts #72 - 🤘 The Long Good Bye

April 10, 2025

By Gus Balbontin
Edition #72

Hey Rebels!

As always, I promise to provoke you in less than 5 min once a week so that you can stay adaptable and on top of your game.

Let’s get into it!

Just over a month ago my eldest, Neylan, and his girlfriend left to spend 3 months in South America travelling. They are in Peru right now about to start their walk to Machu Picchu.

He finished year 12 last year, got accepted at uni and deferred the offer to go travelling instead.

For a moment there he said he was going to finish school and go straight to Uni and I was like “no no, go travel”.

Go be a kid with no responsibilities for a bit longer!
Go figure out what your interests are, have a break from the system!

Anyway… he did decide to travel and weirdly enough, pretty wife and I got progressively more emotional as his departure date drew closer… even though we of course wanted him to!

Weird hey?

My kids have been travelling since they were born, I always say in the absence of a religion, ours is travelling.

So it was almost inevitable that he was at some stage going to travel and leave the nest.

I think I was emotional not because he was leaving (that was exactly what I wanted), I was emotional because his departure underlines the transitional period we are in, the moment when they finally take off and most of your job as a parent is done.

Letting go is hard even when you plan for it.

Like pretty wife said as we were both wiping our tears… ”it’s like a long goodbye”… when they are born you know they are going to leave, and you parent to ensure they have everything they need to succeed at leaving but then when they are leaving you realise that success means letting go!

For those without kids don’t think this concept of the long goodbye doesn’t apply, anything you start in life has inevitably a long goodbye in it.

Think of new activities, sometimes friendships, projects...

Interestingly when I say that you need to learn to let go… it’s the same.

The awareness and ability to start something knowing that at some point in time, you need to let go to create space to start something else.

Here is a simple representation of the long goodbye…

You can of course draw this picture for anything in life… from the project you are in charge of, to your job (eg: the more you let go of your job the more the chances of you growing, emancipating and developing your career further).

So, I’m going to read my “Let Go” newsletter again (click here!) to eat some of my own dogfood…. you should too.

Have fun with this little thought experiment…

Yew

Love

Gus

CHALLENGE OF THE WEEK:
Read my Let Go Newsletter and let go something…

P.S. Click here to join the FREE 5-day email course “the ShakeUp! Starter Series” —short, punchy lessons designed to challenge the way you think about your future and get you moving. We’ll send you one lesson per day over the next few days so you can experience it for yourself. It’s free.

Recommendations:

ALL MY PREVIOUS NEWSLETTERS HERE!!!

Hey! Thanks for being here!
(we are more than 6000+ rebels! already… mindblown!=)

Remember that you can always check out more of my weekly ramblings and newsletters by clicking here —most of the stuff’s still relevant today.
YEW!!!

https://gusbalbontin.beehiiv.com/