Letting Go of Letting Go | PASSAGES :006
"Learn to let go even more."
We should
know that no
one in this life
has learned
to let go who
could not
learn
to let go
even more.
—Meister Eckhart
“What is one thing you are letting go of this year?” a friend asked a group of us the other night over dinner.
Each person around the table took a turn answering this question, along with sharing one intention for 2024.
I went last.
Because I was stumped.
I didn’t know what to say.
As I thought back to this past year and the year before and the five or six years before that, all I could see was a long list of things to let go of, masks to shed, and limiting beliefs to leave behind:
Obsession with achievement and perfectionism and performing to please others.
The career path I had been on for 15 years as an ordained minister.
The fear of failure. The need for so-called clarity. A scarcity mentality.
Accumulated stress and its accompanying reactivity.
And then this past year—as I committed to being present, creating, and staying open—I let go of typecasting myself vocationally and professionally and creatively.
Co-write a TV pilot? Sure.
Manage a brewery taproom? Why not?
Back at the dinner table I gave an answer about letting go of not making any money. Part-joke and part-truth—I’m hoping that some of the seeds I’ve riskily planted over the past few years grow in this regard and I’m also open to other opportunities.
At first, my inability to easily answer the question got me thinking: I’ve let go of so much that I’m not sure there is anything else to let go of.
But the words of Meister Eckhart, the 13th century priest and mystic, remind me that even if I have learned to let go, and done a lot of it, there is always “even more” letting go to do. As one personally committed to the spiritual journey, to cultivating the inner life, to becoming more fully human, I know that letting go is the foundation of the spiritual journey—a journey that I am still very much on. Of course there is more for me to let go of!
So then why couldn’t I think of anything to let go of? What was going on?
It’s because after years and years of practice… letting go has become the norm. Letting go (made especially possible by meditation) has become an ordinary, everyday activity. I’m in a dynamic dance with change on a daily basis. Because I’m regularly letting go, I’m not storing up things or resisting until I’m forced to do a BIG letting go.
Take this past week, for example:
Wednesday, the kids’ school was canceled for a snow day with no snow.
Thursday, my daughter’s flight to Seattle out of Milwaukee was canceled so we scrambled to rebook her on an earlier flight out of Chicago, which meant waking up at 3:30am.
Friday, another snow day (this time with actual snow), which meant that the twelve 12 year-olds gathered in our house for our youngest’s birthday party had a whole lot of pent up energy!
Ok. Ok. Ok.
Don’t you see it? Our days are filled with things not going according to plan. Everything is changing, always. We are being invited to let go, in all sorts of shapes and sizes, all the time.
There is something profoundly comforting about this. Because sometimes we know there is something we need to let go of—something BIG—but we’re not yet ready to let go. What if we just accepted that? What if we were actually okay with it? I don’t mean ignore it. I don’t mean bury it. I don’t mean never do anything about it.
I mean start somewhere else. Begin with letting go, with dealing with the unknown, with adapting in some smaller way. Learn to let go with the little stuff, so you can do even more letting go. Letting go of our expectations or demands in these lower stakes situations grows in us the capacity to let go on a larger scale. Such as the rigid ways we define ourselves, the clinging we do because of our insecurities, and our selfish and self-preserving ways.
Eckhart’s idea that this is always more letting go to do isn’t terrifying and challenging. It’s actually comforting, encouraging, and emboldening. Because each act of letting go prepares you for the next. And then, the “even more” letting go you do, the less difficult it becomes. The less you notice it. And the more natural it becomes.
So natural, in fact, that it starts to feel like you have even let go of letting go…