Just
Let Go
“Just
let go. Let go of how you thought your life should be and embrace the life
that is trying to work its way into your consciousness.”
Caroline
Myss
Letting
go is the developmental challenge of the latter third of life. Some people don’t
have a problem with it. I have a friend who sold her house and all its contents
and moved into a townhouse to start over from scratch. We tend to spend
two-thirds of our lifetime accumulating stuff, and the final third trying to
get rid of it. I remember when my former mother-in-law, Sara, was going through
this stage that I call “the grand clearing out.” Every time I went to visit
her, she had amassed a room full of dishes and bowls and utensils and vases and knick-knacks for me to sort through and take what I wanted. She, herself, was not
going anywhere, but she knew all her “stuff” had to go.
Letting go of material things isn’t the only meaning of Caroline Myss’s quote.
Getting rid of our psychological baggage and our unrealistic expectations are also included. So many of us carry around our wounds for a lifetime. Our
childhood wounds, our marital wounds, our self-inflicted wounds become a
lifestyle. We think we are just stuck with them. “That’s just how it is. Just
how I am,” we tell ourselves. But continuing to carry wounds, accept them as
inevitable, and even feed them is not simply our fate, it’s also a choice we
make. We can stop feeding them. We can stop entertaining them. We can stop
using them to excuse ourselves from becoming responsible for our own lives. According to Caroline Myss, "Every single choice we make is either going to enhance our spirit or drain it. Every day we're either giving ourselves power or taking it away,"
There
is no doubt that life has truly painful patches. Sometimes we feel simply awful,
sad, and angry. But just as with the seasons and the weather, we are meant to
cycle through these phases and come out on the other side. Life is a flow from
one to the next; of sad, to happy, to content, to restless, and so on. When we
get stuck at one place in the cycle, our growth is stunted, and our spirit is held
captive. We must let go and allow life to flow if we want to move beyond sad
and angry to joyful and content.
Letting
go of efforts to control every aspect of your life will lead to living the life
you are meant to live. Sooner or later, unrealistic expectations we impose on
ourselves—to be the best, the only, the king of the roost—bring along with them
anxiety, misery and disappointment. The problem is not that we are not the
best, but that we cannot let go of our unrealistic expectations. Even Serena Williams
loses a match now and then! In the words of author, Anita Moorjani, “Your only purpose
is to Be Yourself, otherwise you will deprive the universe of who you came here
to be.” And that, my friend, would be a shame.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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