The Art of Letting Go

This year I celebrated a certain milestone birthday.  As with all such ages, with which we as a society assign extra weight, it gave me a moment to pause and reflect.  

I have a bad habit, as many people do, of looking at other people and comparing my accomplishments with theirs.  Why does she have that job title at my age?  Am I falling behind?  Why has he traveled to that place I have always wanted to go, he is two years younger than me!  Have I missed my chance?  Why, why, why…

The thing is, I have fallen into a kind of trap that perhaps some of you can relate too, of living too many lives at once.  I want to travel the globe, and read every book on every classics department’s required reading list, learn to speak twelve languages, become the sort of person who hosts dinner parties they cook themselves like a gourmet chef, I want to win a Grammy and an Oscar and debate the finest minds on intellectual topics, to climb Mount Everest and travel to the bottom of the sea.  In short, I want to experience everything.  I keep waiting for these opportunities to arrive and yet the Academy still hasn’t called me for some reason.  It’s exhausting, it's paralyzing, it's impossible.

If I am more than unusually lucky, I have 120 or so years.  Probably not, but let's be ambitious.  I want to squeeze a thousand years of experience into them because I am very aware that there is so much left to do!  And consequently the people around me always seem to be further ahead then I am.  Probably because they have been working towards a goal that I have barely even started.  I am too busy trying to figure out if I should learn French or Italian to plan that trip to Istanbul.  My bookshelves are filled with books I want to read…someday, my fabric bins with half remembered projects that once were so important they consumed my every thought.  I’m not frozen. I have a beautiful life and wonderful people around me. I’m just not doing all that I had hoped with my life thus far.  And this year, it hit me.  I am never going to.

No, I don’t mean this in a morbid sort of way, filled with self pity and the urge to eat an entire tub of buttercream icing.  It is actually incredibly liberating. 

The first thing I did was sell some books.  Language books that I bought with every intention of mastering them and then proceeded to leave on a shelf.  I can't learn twelve languages.  I already speak three and am learning two more, time to let the others go.  I have a friend who happens to be learning two of them and the books now have a purpose and a home.  The guilt has lifted.  

Then it was the counted cross stitch kit I bought during the early days of the pandemic “for something to keep me busy.”  My job picked back up and it ended up being set aside for five years.  Last month I pulled it out, looked at it, picked up a needle and am a quarter of the way through.  In exchange, I took two projects off my online shopping list.  Why buy more? I have this beautiful project right here.  It brought a moment of peace.  

Anxieties began falling away as I let go of plans to travel to the Himalayas…someday, recognized I will never be an expert in biochemistry, and finished off a bin of fabric (some of it going to other people and some of it turned into skirts and shirts and pretty dresses and hanging in my closet).  But one very large dread remained.  I wasn’t doing the things I wanted to do with my career.  So, here it is.  This website is my first step towards what I want to do, what I need to do, the thing that has been burning in my mind since I took that first pile of white and blue fabric and turned it into a pretty garment at six years old.  The thing I realized this year is that milestone birthdays can be a blessing.  Sure, I still haven't lived my dream of going to Istanbul, and there are more than a few books I very much want to read, but I’m not 120 yet, and there is still time for all those things.  I have made peace with the part of me that wanted to learn Sindarin, let that version of me go and embraced the one who is excited to be advancing in her learning of Koine Greek.  I made a choice, it was empowering.   

So while this is not what my blog is going to be used for typically, it’s not a historical musing, book review, craft log, or garden update, it is perhaps a very crucial foundation for all of them.  I encourage you all, if you have read this far, to give up the versions of yourselves that will never be.  Mourn them, it is bittersweet to see them go, but embrace the version of you who is the most perfect.  Not the one who rises to the pinnacle of society, but the one who makes you feel happiest and fulfilled.  Maybe they drink cocoa while sitting on their sofa to read a book, the unfolded basket of laundry from last week beside them, content in the knowledge that a clean shirt is clean whether from a basket or a dresser drawer, or they send handwritten invitations to their nearest and dearest to join them for a dinner party of hotdogs and potato salad, glamorizing the mundane.  

And if you find yourself standing on a precipice, afraid to leap into the unknown, if you're burdened with what comes next as you gaze at a dream slipping away into the distance, don’t sit on the side afraid to move…

Jump.