letting go
Life has been packed, scheduled down to the minute. Everything takes longer than I expect, and yet I want to do everything. It is very hard to prioritize, when everything seems so urgent. I realize that this is a recipe for disaster -- or at the very least, a nervous breakdown. I've been talking to the folks who are closest to me and each of them say the same thing: let something go. Let all of it go. Take care of yourself. The taking care of myself I understand -- the letting go, I do not. Letting things slide, letting the work be delayed or discarded, letting my relationships deteriorate, all of these things are *exactly* what I am trying so hard not to do. And yet, it seems that letting go is the only way that I'm going to move forward from this place of gridlock in my life. At other times in my life, I've believed that if I jumped, the universe would be there to catch me. If I just let go of everything I knew, that I could trust in my skills and my intelligence, and that I could trust that those who loved me would still love me on the other side. And if not, then there would be other loves. I've danced on the cliff's edge before -- and taken the plunge. And still, here I am.
I feel like I've built up this life of security, where I have fought tooth and nail for almost everything I have, a grateful recipient for the largesse of the universe. But now I need to jump again -- to let things be different from what I expected, what I came to believe about my life. I feel like the mountains of my life as I thought it would be are pushing up against the mountains of the life that has come to me, and I am in the middle of this earthquake. Things are as stable and ageless as mountains, yes, and yet the ground shakes beneath me. So I stand in the doorway, and watch pieces of my life fall away. I feel like the building that has lost walls of itself on one side, and yes there is carnage and destruction there, but then there is this whole huge new open vista.
And I know, I am spinning metaphor after metaphor, trying to make sense of my life now. Bear with me. I know I have tears in my eyes, and I fall away inside my body and get stuck in my thoughts spinning like whirlwinds, and yet I tell you that I am happy. All of this is true. I think when I look back at this time in my life, the beginning of 2007, I will smile and shake my head. It was a hat trick, I'll say.
I feel like I've built up this life of security, where I have fought tooth and nail for almost everything I have, a grateful recipient for the largesse of the universe. But now I need to jump again -- to let things be different from what I expected, what I came to believe about my life. I feel like the mountains of my life as I thought it would be are pushing up against the mountains of the life that has come to me, and I am in the middle of this earthquake. Things are as stable and ageless as mountains, yes, and yet the ground shakes beneath me. So I stand in the doorway, and watch pieces of my life fall away. I feel like the building that has lost walls of itself on one side, and yes there is carnage and destruction there, but then there is this whole huge new open vista.
And I know, I am spinning metaphor after metaphor, trying to make sense of my life now. Bear with me. I know I have tears in my eyes, and I fall away inside my body and get stuck in my thoughts spinning like whirlwinds, and yet I tell you that I am happy. All of this is true. I think when I look back at this time in my life, the beginning of 2007, I will smile and shake my head. It was a hat trick, I'll say.