How many magazines did you buy this week? Come on, ‘fess up. Oprah, Real Simple, Chatelaine… These are my January vices because the lead stories are all about starting anew and letting go of the old. I don’t have any hang ups about saying good-bye and tossing things that don’t serve me but I do find myself tripping on this phrase ‘letting go’. First off, is it even possible? Can we actually let go of experiences, learnings, understandings and beliefs we’ve accumulated over the past year? Can we “clean house” so to speak? I You tell me.
My husband used this awesome example with me the other day when I was trying to figure this out. He said that ‘letting it go’ is like releasing the air out of a balloon really slowly. It fizzles out until it’s empty. Having lived with the guy for almost fifteen years, I have to say, that’s exactly what it looks like on him. When the kids catch me in an emotional day and I’ve been crying, I explain that it’s not about them, it’s just that my pitcher of tears was so full that I have to pour some out. So is that letting go? I don’t think so. I’m still not convinced and here’s why. We have emotions and we have imprints and they’re different. Our feelings can’t be forced along or dictated quickly. Have you ever tried to hurry sadness? Pack it up in a box with your other lightly used things and bring it to the Nook? Toss it in the trash? Not possible right? Emotions are like the weather. Sometimes a storm thunders in bringing with it lightening and rain heavy enough to flood fields and muddy our boots. As cliche as it is, the storm will pass and a new weather movement will come in. It’s usually calm and a little tentative at first, but then if the rains truly are through, the clouds of doubt will shift and a sliver of sunlight will expand into a full sky.
But that’s not letting go, that’s noticing the weather. So that still leaves these imprint things I’ve alluded to. Imprints are our experiences, and the meanings we attach to them. Can we re-write the meanings? Yup. Can we re-program the neuro-pathways we created from them? Yes we can. But can we remove the experiences? No. No we can’t. Unless I suppose, we undergo some procedure that wipes our memory… but I digress into a science fiction novel. Okay, so then how do we ‘let go’ of these experiences?
How do we soften the imprint so that we can move past them? The image I use is this: stones in the garden. Where I stand today is on a different stone than where I stood yesterday. I can look back at all the marvelous experiences I’ve had and see them for what I believe they are. These are the stones in my garden that mark the places I have been. Collectively they are wisdom, individually they are moments, and over time they will become the path that was Tina’s life. Romantic I know. I suppose letting go for me is a bit like a scene out of a Merchant Ivory film. I’m in the garden casting stones behind while smaller ones surreptitiously slip out my skirt pocket. What I still don’t know is how often I want to look back. I live next door to Xenia and have walked their Labyrinth many a time. The stones that mark the path were placed by hand over twenty years ago. Like the labyrinth I believe our stones are there to hold us in the direction of our unknown future. Happy New Year from my 2014 close to yours.
