mindfulness – The Other Shoe

Life is just a continual balance of letting go — and holding on.

Photo by Fuu J on Unsplash

How often do we have to DO this thing? All. The. Time. From the instant we open our newborn eyes, we begin the process of letting go. And it doesn’t get easier from there. Life is an endless parade of leaving what we know for the unknown.

We have to lose the training wheels to bike on our own. We leave our mothers at the door on our first day in school. Letting go is what we do. Remember when you discovered the jolly fat man in the overloaded sleigh didn’t travel the world by reindeer to drop gifts by the sackful down our chimneys? Letting go of that was harsh, right? Ditto the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy. No one wants to give up what makes our hearts happy.

“One of the hardest lessons in life is letting go. Whether it’s guilt, anger, love or loss, change is never easy. We fight to hold on and we fight to let go”.

As we leave childhood behind, as training wheels become motorized in our first car, and teen-postered bedrooms becomes college dorms, we release more of the familiar. We get married, have children and one day, we let them go, too. As we learn more of the world, as hurts begin to form scar tissue, our naivete and innocence is left behind. Our hearts get nicked and dented and, the more we open them, the more we risk. Yet, we do it anyway.

The first time we feel the heavy impact of grown up ‘letting go’ is when a person we love walks away. They say sometimes you win and sometimes you learn, but the learning thing can kneecap you almost as much as the person who made the exit. From our first crush, a dating split or divorce, it ain’t ever easy. Breaking the same heart that loves someone so deeply sadly is the price of admission in life.

“Getting over painful experiences is like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward.” C.S.Lewis

Then someone you love dies, and their leaving wasn’t because their love stopped but because their heart did. That’s when the loss of letting go is multiplied endlessly. Whether you lose a parent, sibling, spouse or the very worst – a child, this letting go takes a mega chunk out of everything that makes you tick. And it takes quite a while to get your balance back, your trust in life and to repair your fractured heart.

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Believing that nifty mantra wholesale can be hard to swallow sometimes, especially when ‘everything’ ain’t so pretty. We want to believe things happen for a reason simply because order seems a whole lot better than chaos, right? We tell ourselves and others, when we don’t see any other explanation for things that happen in life, that it’s part of a bigger picture in the karma universe. When lives are turned upside down. When our spouse, parent or child is gone in an unthinkable instant. When a sudden loss of job, income, or house leaves us upended and lost. Thinking it was all part of a greater plan might bring momentary comfort, but it can also leave us frustrated and stuck.

We look for reasons everywhere. We try to justify why the world, and the people in it, behaves as it does. We become scarred and scared by experiences that seem to happen for no reason whatsoever. Cancer. Alzheimers. Death. (Anything on that one? I’ll wait . . .) Oh sure, eventually we learn and grow from all the hard stuff. Done right, we even become better people from living through those times, but the ‘why’? That’s the million dollar question.

Some things in life cannot be fixed. They can only be carried. Megan Devine

Things can and do happen for no reason at all except one that’s universal – we are just human beings having a human experience (in other words, shit happens). In our bumbling search for answers, we forget that no one promised us a rose garden. So, we run in circles looking for cause because the effect often sucks. We look back on our choices, decisions, roads taken – and not taken. We might find a breadcrumb, a clue we hope will lead us to believable reasons. But when illness visits, loss completely ravages, we lose our livelihood or worse, someone we loved more than our own life, no facsimile of a reason will ever be good enough.

There’s no earthly way we can sugar coat the why of murder or child abuse, decimating tornadoes or the crushing grief of SIDS. As much as we yearn for any emotional or psychological balm, no matter how well meaning, any phrase du’jour about life events having a reason can’t take away real pain. In fact, it might make people feel even worse. As lousy as it sounds, feeling desolate when bad things happen is part and even necessary to the grieving process. There’s no easy out and attempting to explain it away with platitudes, just get in the way.

“Don’t try to fix me. Acknowledge me. Stand with me. Be with me.” Tim Lawrence

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