The Breaking
You had it all.
Work was going well. Your girlfriend, perfect. “Life is perfect” you thought to yourself, but what you thought was in your hands, and what you thought was in your control, wasn’t really life at all, but the moment before the breaking — the moment before life comes back. Life then forces your hands empty — that’s what life does. That’s not life being hard or difficult, but that’s life.
Life is not the part when you are holding it all together, or juggling it all at once. Life is not when you have the girlfriend, work is going well and you’re doing well running, playing golf, swimming, at yoga, whatever you love.
Life is the part when you drop it all.
Or when it’s all knocked out of your hand and it scatters at your feet. Because you thought that life was when you were holding all the pieces, you think that you need to reach down, put them back together, hold onto all of them but you don’t.
Life is about the pieces breaking. And letting them break.
We all hold on too tight. We grab onto a friendship long after it actually gives us any joy or happiness. We cling to a job we should walk away from — we keep going through the motions of a hobby that no longer captivates us.
Let
them
fall.
Let them fall. Let the woman that you loved so much, let her go. Work, clients, a once-favorite activity that no longer thrills you like it once did, let them fall away. Life is a fluid, changing, evolving, amazing journey and the more you hold on, the less you flow, change and evolve with it.
Or, Think Of It This Way.
Everything that you have now — everything that you hold onto is from the past. The past was when you met that woman, when you started to play golf, learned how to scuba dive, picked up that new client, whatever it is. For it to be in your life now, by definition, it is from your past.
Life, however, is where you are now and what’s ahead of you. You don’t have to carry anything you don’t want to — anything at all.
So go forward with open hands and heart.
Here’s when I know that life is trying to tell me let go. Usually, there’s a woman involved, someone I thought I loved. Someone perhaps I did. But that starts to falter and fade, or end.
Then, there usually is something else. A client closes the door. And then I look around me — on the ground I see the former love, the former client, the former something and just when I reach down to pick it up — I stop.
Instead, I have learned and I walk away. The voices are behind me, of course, and I hear them. Whenever I want to, or think about, turning around I think of all the times before, when I tried to hold onto something that was meant to be gone, and then I just let it go.
Think of all that you are reaching for as sand through fingers. Let it go through them — let it fall at your feet.
Brush your hands and then start walking again.
