Letting Go
Volume 1, Issue 4: Letting Go
(Originally Published February 17, 2019)
What’s New This Week
Welcome back and thanks for joining us for this week’s (early) newsletter in the Winter Hearth Epic Life Playbook! Thank you all so much for the feedback so far. It’s really a pleasure to be creating content that has so profoundly impacted so many people already, and I’m excited to keep it going!
Following last week’s newsletter on De-cluttering Your Space, the theme of this week’s content is “Letting Go”. Many things come to mind when we think of letting go — from letting go of people from our lives, to letting go of past events, or even letting go of physical items that we struggle to part ways with. The topic of this week’s newsletter is releasing the things that are causing you pain or distress in order to grab hold of something that can bring you much more happiness, fulfillment, and contentment.
As always, there’s plenty of content here, so feel free to just take what you need.
Listen
This has been without a doubt the most powerful podcast episode I have listened to so far (out of roughly 100 episodes), and if you take the time to listen to or watch one thing this week, listen to this podcast from NPR’s TED Radio Hour entitled “Forgiveness”.
Content Warning: The topic of this episode is forgiveness, so understandably some of the stories shared in the episode depict very terrible events that have happened to people in the past, including mass shootings, suicide, issues concerning mental health, and sexual violence.
The episode follows three separate stories, including stories from the mother of one of the perpetrators of the Columbine Shooting in 1999 and a survivor of sexual assault. While these stories do address very heavy emotional subjects, there is so much to be learned from the stories here and I can’t encourage you strongly enough to listen to the episode in its entirety. You can check it out by clicking on the image above this section or on the button below.
Learn
For this week’s Learn section, I listened to The Minimalists and their ideas on “letting go” — this time in terms of letting go of physical things that we may cling to. How many of us have been known to hold on to things “just in case I need it one day”? Before I started traveling and living out of two suitcases, I was absolutely that person. I used to be all about keeping all of those big and little things “just in case”. In both this case and the case where you aren’t a constant traveler, holding on to things that no longer serve you can weigh you down not only physically, as in my case, but also spiritually, mentally, and even emotionally.
In this episode (up to about 18:30… fair warning, it got really weird and I stopped listening after that), Joshua and Ryan talk about their philosophies on what to keep, what to give away, and when it makes sense to choose one option over the other. They have some really good points regarding what it looks like to let go of the things that don’t hold much value for you, and what it looks like to keep only those things that do have value to you. Logically, you must first understand what exactly it is that you value in this world in order to determine which things are worth keeping and which things aren’t. We’ll cover that in a future episode, but for now, check out some of their insights on letting go of those things that may weigh us down.
Level Up
This week’s Level Up section comes from something I’ve experienced recently in my own life. In terms of music subscription services, I’m an avid Spotify listener. I love listening to music, as most people do, and I’m a fan of the jazz, hip hop, R&B, and singer/songwriter genres.
Hip hop is usually my go-to genre when I want to dance or get pumped up, but as many of us have noticed, the lyrics in most of these songs are often obscene, portray somewhat twisted values and ideals, and glamorize lifestyles that can actually be very harmful to the self and to others. Music has long been a method of communicating ideas, and whether we recognize it or not, the music we listen to has a profound effect on the way we think, feel, and act.
(For more insights on the effects of music, check out this piece by the American Academy of Pediatrics)
Spotify, along with some of the other music subscription services, recently rolled out a feature that allows users to toggle whether or not they want songs labeled “explicit” to be able to play as they are listening to music. While some songs containing explicit content may elude being marked as “explicit”, many of the songs are labeled pretty accurately.
I tried this feature for the first time when I went on my 3-week mission trip to South Africa up until about a week after I had returned to the states. After that point, I felt like I was ready to get back to listening to all of the music I had been listening to before the trip, so I turned off the explicit content filter. I played one of the Spotify hip hop playlists, and I remember very vividly the very acute, dissonant sensation that occurred in my brain over the course of a few songs.
I’m not usually the type of person to listen to song lyrics, as I tend to appreciate the music behind the lyrics more so than the lyrics themselves, but upon being re-introduced to all of these messages, I could finally see with a refreshed perspective how the messages in certain music has been and can be so harmful not only for impressionable youth, but also really for anybody. After a few songs, I couldn’t stand to listen to the messages any longer. Having realized how harmful they can be to the way we think and act as well as the ideas that they are really communicating, I turned the filter back on indefinitely.
Keeping in line with the theme of “letting go”, I realized from this experience that music that communicates these negative ideas is something that doesn’t add value to (and maybe even detracts value from) my own personal experience in life, and so I’ve decided to let it go. This is not to diminish the hip hop genre as a whole, because there are still many great songs in the genre that don’t share the same ideas as those in the explicit category. More generally, the realization that I came to recently is that if something does not serve you in a positive way, let it go. In letting go of that music, I was prompted to find new, interesting artists and genres that I might not have explored otherwise, and it has been great so far.
Take a close look this week and see if there is anything you are holding on to that might be keeping you back from realizing a deeper, more intentional, and more meaningful experience in your life.
Fireside Spotlight
In last week’s Fireside Spotlight, we saw a piece called “From the Heart”, and this week’s piece is a poem entitled “The Simple Sound”. It explores that sentiment that many of us reach at some point — that desire to cling on to (or return to) the innocence of youth and to hold on to those sweet memories of the past.
The Simple Sound
The transience of youth,
Spurred on by the silent truth
That nothing gold can stay —
Maybe it’s better that way.
We live, we love, we laugh, we learn,
Our hearts grow cool while our spirits yearn
For the days of old when life faced the sun
And we played each day till the day was done.
But as life speeds up,
We must learn to slow down.
Learn to hurry slowly —
Listen to the simple sound.
Feel the rhythms of your peace,
Sense the quiet heart’s pound,
Hear the beat of quietude
Conquer the mind’s battleground.
- Elgin Davis
Walk It, Talk it
Thanks again for joining us this week in the Winter Hearth Epic Life Playbook! In the words of Dale Carnegie, “Knowledge isn’t power until it is applied.” How can you apply the ideas in this newsletter to your life? How can you use it to gain power in living a more epic story? Talk to your friends and family this week about something you found interesting in the newsletter.
This weekly newsletter is a labor of love, so if you enjoy reading it each week, please share it with your friends to assist us in reaching our goal of helping the world engage more deeply with the human experience :)
Your Greatest Chapter Awaits
Until next time,
Elgin
Have feedback? Content you want to learn more about?
Feel free to drop an email to winterhearthstudios@gmail.com to get in touch with me, I’d love to hear from you!
Hey, I’m Elgin, and I love to create. I’m the creator of Winter Hearth Studios and the Winter Hearth Epic Life Playbook, a space where we explore the depths of the human experience, discovering the keys to crafting a better life and inspiring you to Live An Epic Story.
I’m currently a 4th year student at Harvard University studying computer science and design, and in my free time I love to travel, draw, read, and pursue bold, exciting adventures.
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