Learning to Let Go
It is easy to believe that we have more control than we do when life is going our way. We start to forget that life is bigger than we are. That it is wild and unpredicatable. Life doesn’t always follow the rhythm we think it should. Sometimes we don’t get what we want. Sometimes we lose the things we cherish most. In these moments it can feel like we are spinning through space, with no ground to stand on. Accepting the situation or sitting with the uncertainty feels impossible. So we spend more and more time in our minds. We try to figure out ways to control the uncontrollable, to solve the unsolvable. We close ourselves off from life in an attempt to figure out how to keep ourselves safe.
But the myth of control was never one that served us to begin with. It is only when we accept how little control we have that we can experience the wild beauty that is life. This world is full of uncertainty. It is made up of both joy and sorrow, love and grief, pain and beauty. The more we try to eliminate one side of the equation, the more we lose on the other side as well. The smaller and smaller our lives become. We don’t get to choose what happens to us. Worry and rumination don’t actually control anything, they only cut us off from living. By opening our hearts to life, with all its uncertainty, we allow ourselves to be participants in the bittersweet poetry that is the human condition.
None of this is easy. All acceptance is a form of grief. Grief for the life we imagined, grief for the things we lost, grief for the control we thought we had. Grief is a process we have to go through. Acceptance is only the last step. We have to let ourselves feel all our raw emotions in order to reach it. It’s a hard and brave thing to do. But it is the only path to life. It is only through acceptance that we learn to find ourselves again. When we make peace with uncertainty, when we learn to let it be there instead of trying to figure out a way around it, we begin to live again.
Each time we feel ourselves pulled from the present moment by rumination about the past or worry about the future, we are given an opportunity to practice acceptance. Allowing the thoughts to be there, without pushing them away or engaging with them, can feel scary at first. Letting go of the quest for certainty can feel like taking a leap of faith. But the thoughts lose their power when we practice bravely facing them without arguing or giving into their demands. When we treat them like they aren’t dangerous, we are able to see that they are only thoughts. They begin to seem less real. They begin to seem less true. All we have to do is wait for them to pass. And, before we know it, they will.
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