Learning to let go

A few years ago, while spending a day with a troubled teenager as part of a mentoring program, I ended up paired with a forbidding looking 16-year-old, someone who looked like she had definite opinions.  Before long, I was listening to a sad tale about how “the guy she liked and thought she had a thing with had started spending more time with her best girlfriend and how they were leaving her out of their activities.”  The story was typical — but not the part where she confessed to have been driven to self-harm by her anger. 

As I struggled to find the exact right words to say, I was struck, having, till then, considered myself still “young,” by the experience gap between the young woman and myself, the distance between the sturm und drang of my own youth and the gritted-teeth calm of my then relative adulthood. I had been her once, but I no longer was her and the difference between us was not in the situations we found ourselves in — life never stops throwing curve balls — but in how we dealt with them. 

Drawing on my extra 15 years of living, I told her as gently as I could that she would get over the hurt in time, that there were probably much better guys in her future or, at the very least, a guy who would actually like her best, and that by the time she was in university, which I hoped she would attend, she would have forgotten all about this triangle of pain.  I guess all I was really saying was — just let go and let life happen.  A task, I wryly told myself, much easier said than done.

Having just advised someone to give up on a fruitless wait for a relationship to flower and recalling the countless times I counseled my own self to let go of a person or a problem which was driving me mad, I have, over the past weeks, mulled over the mystery of why we hold on to things long after their expiration dates — clothes, e-mails, places, jobs, people, roles, memories.  Legend in our family has it that one of our aunts holed herself up in her house for the rest of her life after the man she loved married someone else and moved into the house directly opposite.  I have seen countless friends and relatives blind sided by rage over something or someone they thought they had “let go” of years before.  Being, myself, highly emotional, I am constantly amazed by my inability to let go of anything, be it a knick-knack or a hurt.  I am, like a lot of people, it seems, impulsively, occasionally pathologically, deeply invested in holding on to things for dear life. 

Why we hold on is as much a mystery to me as how one determines the right moment to let go. In the case of our legendary aunt, that moment probably should have been when her beloved married someone else but for other less clear-cut situations, figuring out when to throw in the towel is much harder to determine.  Should one keep up a business or fold it? Should one stay at a job or leave it?  Should one work at a relationship or cut one’s losses? Should one move countries or be content where they are?  When does one let go or let be?  I have walked away too early. I have also held on much too long to a forlorn hope.  And all I can say for sure is that only hindsight is 20/20.

Take, for example, the Dalai Lama, by almost all accounts, divine and yet even his detractors argue he gave up on armed action too soon and too readily.   By choosing to let go and let be, by choosing a path of peace rather than of conflict, he has become a global symbol of peace, with an influence and world-wide fan-base much larger than that of his oppressors.  That said, without a proper homeland, his people are scattered around the world and Tibetan culture is on the verge of disappearing forever.  Maybe the Dalai Lama is wrong. Maybe there are times we have to keep fighting the good fight for what we want, for what we think is right and good.  Or maybe the Dalai Lama knows something we don’t.  Maybe he is playing the long game, or a game whose stakes are beyond our comprehension. It is really hard to tell.

I used to take care of the orchids of someone whose job was preparing the terminally ill, mentally and emotionally, for death. I asked her how she did this and she said the process entailed getting the person to let go of the idea of themselves as still part of this life.  It is only when that step is taken that they are ready to move on peacefully.  Otherwise, the process of death is wrenching, the person grasping till the bitter end to the things they loved and the things they spent their lives building.  So, I guess, in the ultimate experience of letting go, some answers to my questions.  Why do we hold on? Because we become attached.  Because we love.  When do we let go? When all other options have been exhausted and when it is the only thing left to do.

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