“Letting Go”

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 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!"