Letting go. Sounds so simple doesn't it ? Just two words that neither
rhymes nor gives an impression that they are anything more than
mundane. Yet those two innocent words kept me away from this familiar
song of my keyboard for a while.
The first time I seriously thought about the idea of letting go was when I read an article in one of ancient editions of Reader's Digest from my dad's collection, back in the days when the magazine held some serious content (if you were willing to overlook the unabashed admiration of capitalism). It was about two people who met in New York and made each other immeasurably happy. They loved each other yet due to some twist of fate (I cannot exactly remember what), they got separated. Fast forward ten years, they are happily married with children and by chance, meet each other at the place where they used to meet in their youth. Then it goes on describing how they meet occasionally, now close friends.
At that time I felt the story was immeasurably tragic (I still do by the way), there was even a picture of a young couple holding each other and beaming. They weren't with each other just because they were unlucky ? That feels fucking unfair. Giving up and accepting that seems equivalent to jumping off a moving train, only the ground waits till you're seventy and reminiscing to hit you. At this point I pretty much decided to not think about it too hard and years swooshed by, till a few things happened, mostly out of my control, that turned my world not upside down but to some significant angle approaching the vertical.
Control. Simple isn't it ? One of the things that make letting something go very hard is, rather unsurprisingly, control. Most people land themselves in places where they have no option but to let go, where they have no control over how things will play out. Hands behind their back,they watch helplessly as part of their love, dreams, emotions and life burn bright. Nope, they can't lift a finger. There is something about going down fighting, even though we know of the imepending doom that lets us live with ourselves. When you're forced to let go, you can't fight anymore and you can't tell yourself that there was nothing more you could do.
Is the fate of those who let go in anticipation any better ? To have some control, to feel that their life is still theirs, they shoot themselves in the foot and watch it bleeding out. It's pretty brave and feels like you're gutting yourself. The possibility of eternal regret comes securely with the package.
What the wisdom seems to offer are facts like all feelings of hurt or guilt or fear dim over time inevitably and life is so vast that if you loose something at one point, you'll get another chance sometime later. Things like 'It's still not too late for you to fall in love'. Well they certainly aren't any help when you're drowning and you basically know they're partly true when you're finally swimming up to the choppy surface. It doesn't even help one bit that you can't bring back dead people, whatever amount of improbability you're willing to add to your mental projections.
I still don't know whether to let go or to not let go. Sometimes letting go seems brave and sometimes fighting till your last breath seems braver. That is the frame of mind with which I sat down to write this a couple of months and decided not to. The world already has a lot of hard truths in it, I don't need to make my already thin readership sad. Then I noticed something. This whole business of what people thought about letting go was centered around one thing, themselves. 'You'll get another chance' , 'It happens to everyone, you're no exception'.
I'm skeptical about most of advice that's out there in the Internet, including mine. What I'm about to say probably works but is incredibly hard to keep in mind, considering how forgetful all of us are as humans. It might make a bit of sense to you or none at all.
There is another kind of letting go that we don't think about often. I'll leave you to judge for yourself why.
Ever wonder why the world is centered around you ? You protest to hike your salary, fuck the other guy who might be taking a cut, management will take care of it. If it doesn't then he should fight for himself.The following example is pretty amazing since it is so universal and clearly brings to light the inconsistency of actions centered around maximizing what you get locally.
You honk at any pedestrian who might the cross the road because you don't want to wait. You curse any car that honks at you and almost run over you, when they have no reason. You lament the lack of cops when you're walking and their very presence when you're driving. You see the problem here right ? I can imagine the well worn smirk on the accused's face and the rehearsed reply, ' Yeah I do but everyone does it right ? If I stop doing it tomorrow, the world isn't going to change !'
If you haven't read 'Themavu' (The honeyed mango tree) by Vaikkam Muhammad Basheer, one of the greatest Malayalam writers of all time, you probably should. Take my word for it, the 15 minutes you spend reading it will leave you a better human being. ( http://sandeep-rb.livejournal.com/24981.html, a translational, definitely not Basheer but better than nothing.) . It is the story of a man who did something, an action so small that it literally can change the world. Think of this little thing when you're driving by a road canopied by tall tamarind and rain trees (or oaks and pines !); did the people who planted those trees ever get to sit under their shades on a hot summers day, as you do sometimes ?
I think that is they key to letting go.
'What if I'm not good enough?'
'How will I live with myself if I fail, what will my parents, my friends, my love will think of me?, most of all what will I think of myself?'
'What if what I'm not doing the right thing?' 'What if this doesn't work out?'
'What if I could have done something back then?'
'If only I had a little more talent and were as smart as people who went to Ivy league?'
'If only I had more courage'
Give yourself a break for a moment. No one is that important. After all, all of us are just cosmic dust that got together thanks to gravity. It should be pretty clear what I'm shooting at by now. Good, because its very hard to precisely put it into words what I want to say. Letting go is a bit like removing yourself from the equation on a page but writing your name on the book.
Despite being just cosmic dust, you're pretty big. We are above these artifacts of thought which constantly judge us and our actions, make us lie sleepless in bed. Realize that it isn't really about you, not as much as you think anyway. You're going to be wiped out some day, your body and brain shut down forever. Nobody is going to make a table of the good and bad decisions you made. No one is going to keep score, no one will remember your mistakes and no one's going to care if you made a fool of yourself trying. Then perhaps we can truly change the world.
The first time I seriously thought about the idea of letting go was when I read an article in one of ancient editions of Reader's Digest from my dad's collection, back in the days when the magazine held some serious content (if you were willing to overlook the unabashed admiration of capitalism). It was about two people who met in New York and made each other immeasurably happy. They loved each other yet due to some twist of fate (I cannot exactly remember what), they got separated. Fast forward ten years, they are happily married with children and by chance, meet each other at the place where they used to meet in their youth. Then it goes on describing how they meet occasionally, now close friends.
At that time I felt the story was immeasurably tragic (I still do by the way), there was even a picture of a young couple holding each other and beaming. They weren't with each other just because they were unlucky ? That feels fucking unfair. Giving up and accepting that seems equivalent to jumping off a moving train, only the ground waits till you're seventy and reminiscing to hit you. At this point I pretty much decided to not think about it too hard and years swooshed by, till a few things happened, mostly out of my control, that turned my world not upside down but to some significant angle approaching the vertical.
Control. Simple isn't it ? One of the things that make letting something go very hard is, rather unsurprisingly, control. Most people land themselves in places where they have no option but to let go, where they have no control over how things will play out. Hands behind their back,they watch helplessly as part of their love, dreams, emotions and life burn bright. Nope, they can't lift a finger. There is something about going down fighting, even though we know of the imepending doom that lets us live with ourselves. When you're forced to let go, you can't fight anymore and you can't tell yourself that there was nothing more you could do.
Is the fate of those who let go in anticipation any better ? To have some control, to feel that their life is still theirs, they shoot themselves in the foot and watch it bleeding out. It's pretty brave and feels like you're gutting yourself. The possibility of eternal regret comes securely with the package.
What the wisdom seems to offer are facts like all feelings of hurt or guilt or fear dim over time inevitably and life is so vast that if you loose something at one point, you'll get another chance sometime later. Things like 'It's still not too late for you to fall in love'. Well they certainly aren't any help when you're drowning and you basically know they're partly true when you're finally swimming up to the choppy surface. It doesn't even help one bit that you can't bring back dead people, whatever amount of improbability you're willing to add to your mental projections.
I still don't know whether to let go or to not let go. Sometimes letting go seems brave and sometimes fighting till your last breath seems braver. That is the frame of mind with which I sat down to write this a couple of months and decided not to. The world already has a lot of hard truths in it, I don't need to make my already thin readership sad. Then I noticed something. This whole business of what people thought about letting go was centered around one thing, themselves. 'You'll get another chance' , 'It happens to everyone, you're no exception'.
I'm skeptical about most of advice that's out there in the Internet, including mine. What I'm about to say probably works but is incredibly hard to keep in mind, considering how forgetful all of us are as humans. It might make a bit of sense to you or none at all.
There is another kind of letting go that we don't think about often. I'll leave you to judge for yourself why.
Ever wonder why the world is centered around you ? You protest to hike your salary, fuck the other guy who might be taking a cut, management will take care of it. If it doesn't then he should fight for himself.The following example is pretty amazing since it is so universal and clearly brings to light the inconsistency of actions centered around maximizing what you get locally.
You honk at any pedestrian who might the cross the road because you don't want to wait. You curse any car that honks at you and almost run over you, when they have no reason. You lament the lack of cops when you're walking and their very presence when you're driving. You see the problem here right ? I can imagine the well worn smirk on the accused's face and the rehearsed reply, ' Yeah I do but everyone does it right ? If I stop doing it tomorrow, the world isn't going to change !'
If you haven't read 'Themavu' (The honeyed mango tree) by Vaikkam Muhammad Basheer, one of the greatest Malayalam writers of all time, you probably should. Take my word for it, the 15 minutes you spend reading it will leave you a better human being. ( http://sandeep-rb.livejournal.com/24981.html, a translational, definitely not Basheer but better than nothing.) . It is the story of a man who did something, an action so small that it literally can change the world. Think of this little thing when you're driving by a road canopied by tall tamarind and rain trees (or oaks and pines !); did the people who planted those trees ever get to sit under their shades on a hot summers day, as you do sometimes ?
I think that is they key to letting go.
'What if I'm not good enough?'
'How will I live with myself if I fail, what will my parents, my friends, my love will think of me?, most of all what will I think of myself?'
'What if what I'm not doing the right thing?' 'What if this doesn't work out?'
'What if I could have done something back then?'
'If only I had a little more talent and were as smart as people who went to Ivy league?'
'If only I had more courage'
Give yourself a break for a moment. No one is that important. After all, all of us are just cosmic dust that got together thanks to gravity. It should be pretty clear what I'm shooting at by now. Good, because its very hard to precisely put it into words what I want to say. Letting go is a bit like removing yourself from the equation on a page but writing your name on the book.
Despite being just cosmic dust, you're pretty big. We are above these artifacts of thought which constantly judge us and our actions, make us lie sleepless in bed. Realize that it isn't really about you, not as much as you think anyway. You're going to be wiped out some day, your body and brain shut down forever. Nobody is going to make a table of the good and bad decisions you made. No one is going to keep score, no one will remember your mistakes and no one's going to care if you made a fool of yourself trying. Then perhaps we can truly change the world.
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