the art of letting go
To get a visceral feeling of what letting go is like, put out your hands, palms up, make tight fists, and notice how this affects your whole body - your breathing, your jaw, your muscles. Then breathe out and let your fists fall open. Breathe again. Just as holding tightly puts the squeeze on every part of your body, letting go helps everything start to flow together.
This is an art that is difficult to master.
This is an art unlike any other passion like music or astronomy - you look at the stars one quiet night and think to yourself that you are going to find out the secret behind their winks, but you don't sit next to a stranger in Starbucks one day and tell yourself that you are going to let go of him or her. You need to know and make sacrifices for this person, you need to have your heart broken by the same hands you had held, clasped with the fingers entwined. You need to feel for him or her, liquid love and hate dissolving into each other until you are uncertain which is the solvent and the solute.
Letting go only happens when holding on turns out to be more effort than it's worth; you have to know what, in fact, you're holding, why you started having it in the first place, and what it's worth to you to keep holding onto it.
Memories, good and bad, stay in most of our minds and, with time, crystallise into snapshots in our inner photo album. These photos might have turned yellow and crinkly and it's perfectly alright to take them out now and then and look at them in fondness, but some of us cut them up into pieces, regret and try to glue them back, cut them up again and so on... Friends. Sometimes we hinder their mastery of the art of letting go. We see what they are holding on and we think we know better. When we make a judgement or a criticism about it, we are adding our negative 'energy' to their situation. When we collectively say, "What so and so is doing is terrible...why are they still holding on to...", we are adding to the energy of that event; we are making it worse for the people in it. What we can do at these times is to emphathise, be neutral and know the highest truth - what is happening is part of His plan to make them stronger in the end.
Having to leave that someone often makes us lose our affections for other things as well: the restaurant of the first date, the favourite park bench you sat together laughing, the rendezvous point at the MRT station after work. All these are lost also, occasionally to flicker back into life when in some years to come, you walk past that restaurant and smile gently to yourself. And I suppose that's the real art of letting go. You can let go anything between a game of chess, your wallet or that someone you had cherished for so long and you will feel anger, fear, betrayal, jealousy, resentment or bitterness. But, and there is always a 'but', for the really important things in life, you know that later on down your road, you'll catch a glimpse of the sweater she always wore, or smell his favourite aftershave, or notice the way in which someone moves their hair exactly the way that someone did, and you'll transport back to your memories. And they are a lot harder to let go than anything else in the world.
for you who's trying everyday
Labels: introspection
