The Wonders of Learning To LET GO…

The Wonders of Learning To LET GO Ó  2012 Currie Silver

Alycia Neighbors’ prompt in A Year With Myself’s Module 22: Letting Go asked me straightaway last week to let myself ponder the somewhat littler Letting Goes of Life. Her delightful story of her daughter’s lost tooth reminded me of when I first BEgan even to BE aware that Letting Go was part of Life.

Having grown-up in a rather mobile way, I never truly understood what was required to hang onto the “stuff” that I’d accumulated. It just seemed to BE there. Until, that is, it was MY responsibility to move it. This, along with presumptions of so many things, made it exceedingly difficult for me to part with “things” as Life rolled on.

I remember my first significant “move” on my own, after my divorce in 1983. Moving across the country with my nearing 5-year old son, taking him 3000 miles from his dad, I recall BEing more concerned with our things than that fact.

Within the first year of BEing transplanted, I found myself without my son, having been overwhelmed by the sheer enormousness of EVERYthing Life was dishing up to me. He’d gone to spend part of the summer with his dad and I said, Let him go to school there, with you… It was at this time when I first discovered what Letting Go was REALLY about. Well, at least for me.

The odd yet honest thing I just put all together from writing the above was how little I understood about Letting Go of people. You see, I’d grown up living at a significant distance from my mother, and living with my father and stepmother, I was at a remove from him as well. I’d got used to having good friends at a distance, too, and seeing them in the summers, at camp, seemed to me actually normal.

Letting Go isn’t that hard, at least in my brain it’s NOT. But here’s another true confession. Shortly after I’d “let go” of my son I was attending a church where I was fortunate to have a minister who would talk with me. Mostly our talk was about Life things, NOT so much in a therapeutic way, but our talks did have that bent to them as well. I recall asking her to help me understand how to Let Go.

Honestly, I didn’t know HOW-TO. It was really a forest for the trees sort of thing. I remember she said to think of something as though it were inside a balloon. Then, let the balloon slip out of my hand, up up up and into the sky.

This has been my working definition for Letting Go for nearly 30 years Now. Always the whatever inside the balloon and up up up into the sky.

Now, with my son the age I was when I first started to ask how to Let Go, I once again find myself seeing trees where I used to only see a forest. I am one of the fortunate few who still has both her parents. Although I canNOT even remember them when they were together anymore, I realise that I’ve long ago let both of them go.

BUT…

I can’t figure, for the Life of me, how I WILL ultimately Let Go of them when that time comes. I suppose I am assuming they will go BEfore I DO, yet that is again an assumption. I mean, HOW DO I Let Go of mother and a father who have had only the smallest of roles in my Life for 50 years Now?!

These are some of my thoughty thinks about Letting Go. I didn’t set out to think them or write about them, I just let the Alycia’s prompt ride along with me.

Earlier today I had an appointment with my doctor. He was surprised that I’d Let Go of my car since our last visit in February. He wondered at my having NOT got a bicycle, or, in my case, a 3-wheeler. I realised as I answered him that I simply like living inside my day. “A bicycle is just another thing to consider, take care of, and manage. I am DOing fine,” I said, “riding the bus and using my own steam to get where I need to go to DO what I need to DO.”

In that response I pretty much have summed-up my thoughts on Letting Go. If it is essential to this day, I find how to manage it. If it means I have to stretch way BEyond this day, I simply don’t go there anymore.

Letting Go of my car was both sudden and slightly bodacious. And having lived Now 2 months without it, I realise how much I was always carting about and holding onto while I had it. I continue to reduce the amount of “stuff” I have. I am more aware of Holding On and Letting Go. They are so constant Now that I sometimes forget how far apart they lived for my whole Life up until recently.

Tying this back to Alycia’s prompt, I never really knew that holding onto the “stuff” of my Life, like my car, was blurring my vision. Since I let my car go I have felt like an entirely different person. I have discovered so much more strength, physically speaking, in me. I relish the walking I DO Now, the tiredness of my body at the end of a day. I have grown a new Soul in many ways, simply through reducing my Life’s cost by eliminating all that it costs to have a vehicle in this World.

I’d like to say I did this for the reasons above, but that wouldn’t BE the truth. I did it BEcause it was the only thing I could DO Right Now to reduce the costs of my Life.

BUT…

Instead of “reducing” anything I have been added to. I have opened up. And I have grown in ways both wondrous and diverse.

I have discovered myself inside my balloon. IMAGINE my surprise…