Recently, my parents sold our old house in Johor since they hardly stay there anymore. They spend most of their time with my sister and I in our PJ condo. Furthermore, maintaining a 20-30 years old house is not cheap at all especially if there’s nobody taking care of it. Thus, we’ve decided to sell it off even though it’s quite a difficult decision to make.

While moving and packing our things, my sister and I talked about the past….the incidents experienced by us in that house. After all, we’ve been staying there for over 20 years. Surely, there are some feelings left for the house. The quarrels, the pets, the playing sessions (yea, i used to play masak-masak aka cooking game with my sister. I know it’s sissy but well, she has nobody else to play with), etc. We miss all of them. And at one point during those conversations, my sister cried because she was sad that we have to sell the house …and we might not be able to go back ever again.

I’m sad too (i’m not heartless). But I told my sister that we HAVE to sell the house. Due to our hectic work schedule, it’s pretty hard for us to go back to Johor so often and thus, our parents have to help us to go back and clean up the house (and sometimes fixing it since old house tends to be quite problematic). And they’re no longer as young and energetic as they were many years ago. Furthermore, it’s very expensive to maintain that old house and we wouldn’t want to burden our parents in terms of financial too.

Thus, it is necessary for us to sell the house off no matter how much we hate to sell it.

It’s for the sake of our parents – which is good enough a reason to sell the house.

Those reasons actually helped to prevent my sister from crying again (she’s very emotional and sentimental).

That is my story. I’m sure most of you have encountered something similar before – something which causes an extreme emotion. Maybe it’s due to your loved one leaving you for work purposes, or your kids going to another country to further their studies, etc. Whatever it is, I feel that it can be overcome if we managed to find strong reasons to convince ourselves that “it is going to be fine”.

This does apply to other things as well such as when you want to buy that ultra expensive bag. All you need to do is to try and find some good reasons NOT to buy. Just like when we’re selling the house. It’s easy to find reasons not to sell the house but for our case, we want to find reasons why we should sell the house so that we will not feel that sad. Remember that finding a positive reason is always more encouraging than finding a negative one which can be quite damaging.

So the next time you face such a situation, maybe you can spend some time to find some good reasons to overcome such an extreme emotion. Hope it helps.