Question of the Week 23: Letting Go
How do you let go? If a child asked you how to let go, would you know how to answer them?
If you’d like to read the background to this Question of the Week series, check out this post.
Broadening the idea of Letting Go
There are many layers to letting go: it’s not always a person, a job, or a thing. Sometimes, it’s an idea, a way of being, a tight grip on something that needs to be loosened. Sometimes, it’s a hope, a plan, a dream. Sometimes, it’s the paths we choose not to take and learning how to fully embrace the ones we have chosen.
Fake it ‘til you make it
Letting go seems to be an ever-unfolding process where initially it is forced (either upon us or by our own need to move forward in a new way), and we must push ahead with the doubts and questions and clinging and looking back at what once was. Something in us continues to move forward, even while wishing this letting go were not so.
And then, as some point, we stop looking back. At a further point, we don’t think about it every day. Somewhere down the line, we wake up one day realizing we have let go fully, even it is still sad or painful to recall.
Everything we ever held in our hands is given to another or slips like sand through the gate of our fingers into something which to begin with we cannot recognize. From "Letting Go" in David Whyte's Everything is Waiting for You.
We all seem to have our own process for allowing or resisting (likely a bit of both) the process of letting go. But it can be difficult to articulate what, exactly, that process is outside of will/force and time. If a child asked you how to let go, would you know how to answer them?
Week of July 7th, 2024: Letting Go
How do you let go?
Do you have a process or way of going about this?
Where are you helping yourself?
Where are you hindering yourself, and why?
If a child asked you how to let go, would you know how to answer them?
What would you say?
When is the last time you had to let go of something or someone?
What was this process like for you?
How do you feel now?
Creating Space and Leaning In
Part of what feels challenging about letting go for me is the unknown it creates in my life. What now will fill that void?
Letting go creates space for something new. That can be terrifying or thrilling or anything in between. My mind has often tricked me into hanging onto what wasn’t for me out of fear of that unknown — both the unknown of the space itself and the unknown of what will eventually occupy that space — but I try not to feed those thoughts and instead trust both my intuition about when I need to make the choice to let go, or trusting life’s process when that decision is made for me.
I let go by leaning in: to the discomfort, to the emotions, to whatever is before me, to the empty space. I try to get really curious about this human experience I’m having, about the way it’s something we all have to face, about how hard it is but also the moments of relief or joy or beauty that sneak in.
A poem revolving around letting go:
crying in the Target parking lot spring pulls out its final stops with rain-filled gloom a little reset, a little space. early June’s daylight stretches into hope and over puddles on the pavement. one undefined way of being with each other quickly morphs into another unknown, all through one phone call that ended in a Target parking lot: go get your pills. with age our wisdom and caution grows — deeper roots on these old trees — remember when we were falling leaves? remember chasing love in the wind? we don’t want to hurt or be hurting any more, any one. without these roots we topple ourselves onto innocent lovers. survival of some form of love requires digging deep and letting go — what, exactly, should be released? the head or heart, the caution or the intuition, the hopes or the hesitations? these puddles tell me nothing. i walk into the CVS inside Target. with age comes a stronger stride that is only assured in knowing nothing. i collect my pills. in the parking lot i let myself cry. it’s a sadness i can’t quite name. it is like when the summer heat finally stays and we unexpectedly long for rain. -katricia stewart
Like most, I have struggled with moving forward with letting go or setting spark to moments of life that I know would set in motion realities of letting go. Most of the time you’ve got no control of the change and ‘letting go’ is the processing of it. Like you, I’ve come to trust myself, value this little glitter of life we have, and lean into it. We are so strange and magnificent. I focus on the beautiful parts of myself that were involved, prop them as scaffolding, and breathe through it.
It has always been more. Some aspects may be ‘worse’. Some aspects may be ‘better’. I acknowledge the parts of myself that jump quickly at making math out of experience, but it's always, I’ve always, become more. I had a very visual reaction to your prompt - an abstract notion of container (myself) and a mass (the thing to let go) - and what plays out is the densification of that mass as to make room for the new. In fact, it doesn’t feel like ‘letting go’ at all, but rather a setting aside, a refocusing, a curation, but from a self perspective, an evolving person that doesn’t remove, but finds pathways to growth. Yes, there are external shifts and changes of matter, but this little big self of mine keeps collaging as a becoming of more.
I read a line from an old journal this morning: “I’ve got the keys now and I’m letting it all in”. We become more.