That phrase, “letting go” is a well-used one within my age cohort
and among those who would tell us how to age well. “We have to let go.” It is a phrase that has always gone against the grain for me – not because
it is not true, but because I believe that in its common usage it only tells half
the story. Inasmuch as the phrase is a half-truth, the hearers and the speakers
of this phrase are victims of the great, self-harming prejudice of ageism.
Life is a series of letting go experiences. We had to let go of our baby teeth to make
room for permanent teeth. We let go of familiar
relationships with our parents when we left home to go to college, or to the
convent, or to a new home with a marriage partner. Those earlier parental
relationships did not wither and die; they changed into differently nuanced
relationships, different, more mature, but built on the familiar. And who would
argue that one would naturally want to return to the teenage or early adulthood
parental relationship? We recognize the gifts
of deepened relationships which developed as a consequence of our leaving home, of our letting go of a familiar relationship.
Most commonly the
expression of letting go in later life is used as if it were something
different from experiences earlier in our life of letting go, something which leaves us experiencing emptiness and (oh, I rage at the
context of this next word) diminished. The message is that we let go and let go
and let go as we are hurtled on a downward slide until death greets us at the bottom
of the hill.
What is left out of this common usage is the second half of
letting go:
we let go in order to grasp
the new.
This is a one-minute clip that shows, in a physical dimension, what letting
go in order to grasp the new looks like.
Not many of my readers are trapeze artists, I’m sure. And
the physical balance, coordination, agility and endurance is beyond most of us
at any age. Our letting go to make space for the new is the space for further growth and development. What might that be? Deeper insights about one’s self, deeper perspective
about life, peace, surety about things we used not to be so sure about, nuances
in relationships, wisdom, -----.The letting go to make space for the new holds a psychic and spiritual energy that parallels the physical energy of the trapeze artists
in the video.
The new we make space for will not be in the physical agility dimension. Arthritic conditions will not disappear; the
five-mile jog each morning will not reappear; the sense of breathlessness on
the last set of stairs will not absent itself. However, let us never equate or limit our
“self” with our “physical self”.
Perhaps instead of the traditional understanding of the half truth of "letting go" we should see it in its totality -- "let's go!"
