Slogan: Let Go and Let God

"I've been up high and I've been down low But mostly I've been tired I'll tell you, the best thing I ever did was to let it go" -Voltaire, 'Let It Go'

I've been thinking about letting go tonight, about the process that a person goes through to get to the point where they can just surrender to the fact that they can't control everything. I think it's definitely a matter of realizing that hard, forceful control does not always working in every situation. In fact, it may work so rarely that it's not worth trying to begin with. The old adage of winning more with honey than vinegar is very true. I've witnessed a lot of people in my own life who only have a hammer with which to hit things with and so they see every problem as a nail. I see them get confused when they hit the important things in their lives with said hammer and brake them or hurt them, because many things in life are too fragile to just go hitting randomly with hammers. This is the danger of not letting go.

Letting go also deals a lot with patience. Humans can be selfish creatures; I know this because I happen to be one of them. People want what they want when they want it. I tend to get very discouraged when I don't get what I want when I want it, which leads to trying to control situations forcefully before I get to that point.

I was talking with a friend of mine this week about goals of ours. He pointed out that one of our mutual friends had recently met his own goal, and although it took him nearly two years to do it all things happened in time. I could feel myself pouting inwardly, thinking 'but I want to meet my goal tomorrow!'. My goal however, was not something that could happen overnight and I realized I needed to let go of that type of thinking if I was ever going to get where I wanted to go. There's a kind of irony in that.

This week, I was attempting an experiment in not getting into arguments with people. Every day I would wake up and try to remember that I was going to attempt to win my debates with a lighter touch. Unfortunately, I couldn't seem to get through one day without forgetting about this. I would see someone doing something that I thought was stupid and try to put my two cents in. Not that I even have two cents to spare these days, spiritually, emotionally or financially. I thought I would feel better once I put those two cents in though. And besides, I figured they were doing something so horribly wrong that they needed to be corrected and fixed. Most times it just backfired and exhausted me.

I keep trying to turn it over and let the universe sort things out though. Take this afternoon for instance. My nephews were over and making a lot of crazy noise in the kid's room. As I walked past the room, I noticed that the chaos that was erupting in there. Potato chips were thrown all over the floor, pictures were askew, the futon mattress half off the frame. I stopped and was about to raise my voice and ask them what the hell they were doing, but I heard my inner voice say, "Does this really concern you? Do you reeeeally want to get involved in this?" I promptly shut my mouth and kept on walking, toward my own room where I closed the door, turned on the music and by the time I walked out again my nephews were gone and my mother was already cleaning the kid's room. She was dealing with it and I didn't have to do anything.

There are small things like that that I can let go of to protect my serenity, but there are so many other things that bother me and take up my time which I can't seem to let go. The hardest things I have problems letting go of are things that have happened months, or even years ago. Resentments that I carry with me and eat away at me even to this day, even sometimes after I have told the other people involved that I have forgiven them. I heard once that memories buried alive will never die. If you do not work through these issues until you find the forgiveness needed to move past them, they will rot there under the surface and color your relationships with those involved.

I often get into these problems where I want so badly to move on to forgiveness and to where everything is good between me and the other person, that I'll just say that I've let go and that I've forgiven them, but I really truly haven't. I didn't want to do the work necessary, or maybe I thought that I was working on their time table and thus felt the need to forgive them and let go of whatever hurt they'd caused before I'd worked through it. It always comes back up when you go about pushing your problems under the rug this way. Always. Memories buried alive will come back as zombies, eating away at your flesh and your heart, destroying your brain until you can't think of anything but the problems between you and the other person. You need to let go. You need to do the work and find a way to forgive.

A lot of times, these imagined hurts are probably things that the other people involved don't even remember. It's like that old story of the monks who came upon this raging river that they needed to get across. They saw a young woman who wanted to cross it as well but she was worried about getting hurt because the river was really raging. They were in a very strict order and as part of their vows they were prohibited from touching women at all, but still one of the monks decided to pick the woman up, carry her across the river and set her down. He went on his merry way, with the rest of his monk brothers following behind him. They were fuming and griping for the next few hours, until one of them finally yelled at the monk who had touched the woman. “How could you do such a thing?” he shouted, but the monk replied, “I picked up the woman, it's true, but I set her down on the other side of the river. It is you brothers, who have been carrying her ever since.” So often we forget to put things down, and we carry them with us as burdens for a long time after they have ceased to help us-- if they ever really did help us in the first place, which is questionable.

There are times when I'm afraid of putting things down and letting go once and for all, so I'll give it up to my higher power only to take it back again. Strangely enough, my higher power doesn't seem to mind and will take the burden from me each time I allow them to carry it for me. How many humans would be willing to do the same for us? I can't count that many. It is this fact that allows me to trust in my higher power, the idea that it will always be there for me when I am ready to allow it into my life.

I think the main reason I don't let things from the past go is that I think it will keep me from getting hurt a second time around. If I hang onto the hurt, then I seem to think I'll remember not to get hurt again. I'm starting to realize that this is a faulty premise. Forgiveness and moving on does not mean forgetting what happened. You can still heal while continuing to remember not to walk into that trap again. Someone from my Alanon home group has this motto which state, 'Once you know something, it's impossible to unknow it.' Once you know what not to do and how to not get hurt again, the hurt that you are carrying inside of you becomes pointless to keep around. At that point, it's just plain pain. It's not a pain that can teach us anything, because we already know the lesson. It's like staying in kindergarten when you already know the alphabet backwards, forwards, sideways, ect. There is so much more to learn from life, so much more to experience and if we stay in one place we could miss it.

Another hard thing for me to let go of are relationships that are not good for me anymore. I always hang onto people for far longer than I should, even to the point where they are causing me emotional harm and I am doing the same to them. This is still amazingly hard for me to do, because I always feel like it might be the last exit to happiness, even if that happiness only exists in my mind. I've always wanted that person that would stay around no matter what-- I've been abandoned many times in my life and I've never had anyone that was stable enough to stay for very long. I've always dreamt of that friend that you meet when you're still in elementary school, then you grow up with them and grow old and spend your whole lives together. It's a nice dream, but I don't think that'll ever be me. It gets even harder when romance is on the line and your heart is deeply involved. But things do grow stale, even the best of relationships grow apart sometimes. It is then up to us to move on, which I'm still learning how to do. How can we find our happy ending though, if we're stuck on a dead end road?

At the moment, life is not going the way I want it to and I seem to be finding a lot of those dead ends. In fact, it's going pretty much the opposite of the way I want it to. I'm trying to remember that that's okay though. The universe has it's own plan and it's own time in which to unfold that plan, and also it's own time in which to clue me in to what it's plan is supposed to be. It's laughing at me now, I think, doing it's own thing and wondering why I can't see that there's little I can do to change what was, what is or what will be. Perhaps in time I'll have the 'wisdom to know the difference' people always talk about. One day at a time.