At the beginning of this week, I responded to Jennifer Louden’s* “Choose Your Life Mondays” blog post with this:

“I choose to find the good this week by not trying so hard to make the good happen. It’s a bit scary to be open to possibility (opening can hurt, as you point out). But then again there isn’t room for much of anything beautiful within the narrow focus and tight grasp of control. So here goes…”

[ * Can I write a post without mentioning Jen? Gawd, I am such a groupie. ]

Here’s what I learned about letting go…

Letting go of opinion.

Other people’s that is.
I wrote a newsletter that I was a bit freaked out to send – and got the most fabulous fan mail. (Thank you.) I wrote lots of tardy email replies that I felt terribly guilty about only to get responses like, “Don’t ever worry about ‘not replying sooner’ – we all have lives beyond our computers that are a lot more important!”

Lesson Learned: Since I’m not good at guessing what other people are thinking anyway, I’m going to stop worrying about it so much. (Hear that, Stat Crack? You’re next.)

Letting go of the past.

There was period in my life a few years back that was pretty darn dark. And my recovery – the latter part after I had moved through the worst of it – included removing any and all reminders of that period. It was mostly physical reminders I did away with, but some babies got thrown out with the bathwater (as they say) in the form of relationships. You know. People. Lovely, lovely people. I’ve had a few of those people seek me out or stumble upon me in recent months – and reconnecting with them has been the most delightful and healing of reunions (they too were not thinking the kinds of thoughts about me I thought they were thinking). Case in point: catching up with the incomparable Stacy Brice. That was one fun (and long) conversation.

Lesson Learned: Though we are shaped by it, we are not defined or limited by our past.

Letting go of anxiety.

This is tricky because I need to do this through my body. But when I’m grasping, the last thing I want to do is stop and go walk or eat or brush my teeth or sleep or just breathe. Must Do! says my Worried Hamster, but I’m a wreck without that stuff.

Lesson Learned: In progress. My hamster and I still have a lot of negotiating to do on this one. Sensing an imminent breakthrough, though. This helped.

And what did I gain by letting go?

I do a little wrap-up of the week on Friday mornings and one of the questions I ask myself is “Who did I connect with?” And this week’s answer just blew me away. My cup runneth over with all the beautiful souls whose paths crossed mine in some meaningful way in the past five days. It’s staggering. And it has been so much fun.

Such are the rich returns of – I was going to saying being not doing – but it’s really doing with more genuine, open, trusting being-ness.

What did you learn this week?

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