Old blog… new blog… Letting go…Letting be

My inability to let go, I believed was a roadblock to my happiness – or so I thought.

I start the letting go experiment blog – hoping it will remind me to let go easier. I start it, hoping I will write again – as writing feels freeing to me. I don’t post everything I write; I am not sure the thrust of the blog posts remains focused on letting go (or so thinks the former journalist in me).

After spending a good chunk of last summer in the hospital, I question the letting go experiment. I also question if my inability to let go has kept me alive. The many moments in which I think I will not make it, in which I doggedly refuse to let go. Grumpy, confused, scared, sullen, tenacious. The following may have had something to do with it:

Just as I am about to leave for the hospital, my daughter runs out and says in a serious tone, “Mom… don’t die, okay?”

I laugh it off and say, “Of course not. I’m going to be around to harass you for many years”

Truth is - I don’t think I’m in any danger and think I will be back soon. But things go south – as they sometimes do.

Perhaps she saved my life. Perhaps she saves my life every day.

The letting go experiment was never against strength and determination. Besides, things are different in a crisis and there are times we hold on with all our might and refuse to let go. We simply must.

Once the ‘big crisis’ is averted, there are often the ‘smaller crises’ or the aftermath to deal with and clean up. In many ways this is far more difficult. For in the ‘big crisis’, we pool in everything we have, we allow ourselves to be taken care of, to feel the pain, to be vulnerable.

Then we get up and stand on our feet again – for that is what we must do, right? Yet, the feet are wobbly, the pain still lingers, the fears still loom… Yet, we are back on our feet, we plod through our days and our lives. Good thing. Difficult thing.

In doing so, do we toughen up more than we can? Although I have written posts about letting go of tightening up and pressure, and expectations, and about self-compassion, and allow things to roll, something seems off.

I wonder if I am not giving myself permission to be sullen or scared, or whatever ‘negative’ emotion I feel - simply because as you and I both know -- these are things we want to “let go” of.

Yet, I needed to feel those things, perhaps I still do – to move past them.

In martial arts, the wisdom is that you have to first move in the direction of the opponent. Only then, can you divert or gain control.

Letting go feels like pressure, like yet-another-thing-I need-to-do. It makes me feel more discontented about who I am – in all my sullen, scared splendor.

Exhausted, I decide to simply let it be.
Besides that is the only thing I feel capable of. Sour grapes or not, I’m not sure. But I am relieved for the space in which I can allow myself to feel the pain, or fear or frustration, or anger, or sadness, without chiding myself for not trying harder to move past it.

It feels true. It feels real. It feels oddly calming.

The intention of course was not/is not to remain stuck in it (hopefully), in a stagnant morass of gloom.

But sweeping those feelings under the rug, or turning our back, or an impatience to let go of them, seems to make it worse. As in Vipassana meditation, maybe we need to be non-judgmental and show equanimity towards the emotions that arise, knowing they will rise and eventually fall.

And even if letting go is a wonderful thing, perhaps, there are times, when --

instead of letting it go… we simply need to let it be…