Something I learnt was that life was about letting go. It wasn’t only about letting go, however. Life was also about holding on. Life was about effort, and life was about the attempt. When all else failed, though, it was about letting go.
Humans were an intelligent species but look at any one of us and you’d learn how terribly stupid all of us are individually. No amount of philosophy can change it.
To be human was to make mistakes: to eat the wrong berry and die, to touch hot water and get burnt, to push the red button and cause the apocalypse. We didn’t do things because we knew them; we did things as they came. Then, we learned.
In spirit of that stupidity, we had to let someone or something go three times. It wasn’t until the third one that you had.
The first was when you were tired, perhaps, of who you were or of holding on too tightly for far too long. Maybe, you suffered from an inexplicable exhaustion owing to the human condition itself. This is when you told yourself you’re letting it go.
The second happened a few months or years after, when you learned that despite telling yourself, you’d still been holding on, quite secretly and often, unaware. It caught you off-guard. So, you let go and you told them you have, and if it was an idea, you told a friend.
But there is a stubbornness in the human spirit, and so, despite telling yourself and telling someone else, like a child holding onto an unreasonable request, you’re still there, still holding on, waiting.
What about the third? The third didn’t come easily. It didn’t come quickly either. It came when it did.
It came as a fleeting thought, like a cool breeze making you smile, carrying the impossibly heavy weight away. It came as you sat playing cards with family. Or maybe, as you sat in the same booth of the café you’d practically grown up in. It didn’t matter how the third came, only when.
It did come, eventually. It came when you did not want to tell anyone anything; you’d let it go.