Letting go is a concept that, to a lot of people, is about losing something. Perhaps you have had a dream of owning your own business to enable you to own your time. You have given all the blood, sweat and tears you have to give. You hate to let go, but you must because you are out of money, out of friends, getting no where. Letting go means the end of your dream to build that business. You let go and you watch everything fall away. Wow. That feels like such a big loss! You did not get what you wanted, and now not only do you not have a way that doesn’t work, you don’t have a way that does work either.
Okay, now for the other side of letting go. Think about your dream of owning your own business to enable you to own your time. You have given all the blood, sweat and tears you have to give. You accept that it wasn’t the right time, the right place, the right vehicle, or whatever. Picture yourself in a boat on a river, holding onto the rope that keeps your boat at the pier. The pier is your past; it is everything you have gone through to bring you to the point where you choose to let go. You let go of the rope and see, not the pier moving away; but you moving away from the pier in the current—this is you being present. Hanging onto the pier was the same as hanging onto an anchor. It was keeping you from moving on. It was keeping you stuck being stuck. As you drift away from the pier, you naturally turn your eyes forward toward where you are going and you realize where you have been doesn’t matter nearly so much as where you are going.
Recently, my husband and I have re-evaluated the quality of our lives and we have chosen to let go of a number of things. Artemis Limpert, who is one of our favorite trainers, talks about “DOR” which means “dropped on request”. This concept is from the military and basically addresses quitting because things are too hard. Our choice to let go of some things isn’t about letting go of our dreams because things got challenging, it is about finding the best direction to point ourselves toward in order to achieve our dreams. We finally got to the point where we realized changing direction isn’t quitting. It is simply choosing the next step on our path.
One by one we have made decisions of what to release our hold on. As we let go of the first couple of things we definitely felt the loss and wondered if we were out of our minds for letting go. The change came when we began to realize the abundance of opportunity available to us once we moved our focus off that which we felt we must let go of and moved it onto how to spend our future.
A few years ago an email made the rounds and it included a poem called simply “The Dash”. It was about the dash on a tombstone in between the year of birth and the year of death. That dash represents how you have spent your life. Do you want to spend your dash hanging on to things you fear letting go of? Or, do you want to spend your dash choosing where you are going by letting go of things that won’t take you there?
Spend some time in your present heart, decide where your boat is going, let go of the rope tied to the pier, and move out into the current toward your future.
This was right on time and I sorely needed to read it. We are one of many families caught in the mortgage crisis. An “income” property has proven to be a financial hemorrhage. The temptation to doggedly wait until we can recoup our losses keeps us holding on. Thank you for framing letting go in a positive, healthy way.