The Six Simple Words That Taught Me to Let Go
Friends, I have a confession to make: I don’t like to let things go. Opportunities. Behavior patterns. My ideas of how things are supposed to be — you name it. In fact, I can often be found clinging desperately to these lovely little intangibles well past their expiration dates for one simple reason: when I’m making decisions out of fear, joy feels like a limited resource. The Six Simple Words That Taught Me to Let Go Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today. — Mark Twain When life gets scary, or I get panicky, I tend to go all Tim Gunn on my life, forcing square pegs into round holes and lipstick onto pigs, all in the name of MAKING IT WORK. And isn’t that exactly what the world expects us to do, after all – make it work? Slap some sequins on a garbage bag, send it down the runway and call it a day? Or a season? Or a life? The problem with all this “making it work” is that somewhere between all the hustling and hoarding we manage to convince ourselves that what we see, in fact, is all there is. And it’s in moments like those that this mantra has saved me: There’s more where that came from. Because the truth is, the sooner we choose to see our world as a place of abundance instead of lack, the sooner we can loosen our grip on the things that are no longer working. The sooner we surrender to the truth that our perspective is limited, the sooner we begin creating space for our faith to grow. And the sooner we allow ourselves to give away the very thing we’re most worried about losing, the sooner we find ourselves open enough to receive what it is we really need. READ: Surrender: Let Go and Allow the Flow So today, friends— let’s choose not to tighten our grip in fear, but to open our hearts in faith. Because whatever it is you’re afraid of losing (or may have already lost), I guarantee you — there’s more where that came from. More opportunity where that came from. More money where that came from. More time, more love, more grace where that came from. The life you seek is also seeking you. It just can’t find you in all the sequins.
When Your Dreams Don’t Go According to Plan
We live in a world that puts a lot of stock in the idea of “following our dreams.” From a young age we’re taught to believe in them. To chase them. To pursue them with reckless abandon. We’re told our dreams are proof that our life is calling to us. And we’re promised that answering that call will be our greatest challenge as well as our greatest reward. But friends, what if that's not true? When Your Dreams Don’t Go According to Plan Sometimes we must be willing to let go of the life we planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. -- Joseph Campbell What if the great challenge of our lifetime isn't all the hard work and sacrifice it will take to bring about our reward? What if the challenge is that even after all the hard work and sacrifice, the reward never comes? What if, despite all the risk and vulnerability and exposure, we still don't get the thing we really want? Or make the impact we're longing to make? Or seem to matter any more today than we did yesterday? What if our dreams don’t pan out the way we planned and we end up with nothing to show for all that striving and struggling? What do we do with the waste? How do we make up for the loss? Where can we possibly go from there? The truth is, it’s hard to invest in ourselves when the returns aren't visible. It's difficult to keep pouring our blood, sweat and tears into a tank that never seems to read half full. It's tempting to give up on our purpose when it doesn't go according to our plan. And yet. Our purpose rarely stays on script. In fact, if we were to look back on our lives, we’d probably see that some of our strongest foundations were built on the ruins of “great plans” that never got traction, all because some greater plans happened to be at work behind the scenes. We’d realize that every rug that’s ever been yanked out from under us has ended up revealing some spiritual equivalent of gorgeous, natural hardwood we never even knew was there. We’d notice that all the curve balls, forcing us down paths we never would have chosen, have also led us to places we now would never wish to leave. Our lives are filled with these great rewards. They just happen to look nothing like we imagined they would. So friends, if you’re feeling discouraged today, or deflated, or simply tired of searching for rewards in the rubble — take heart: It’s not your purpose that need scrapping, but your plans. It's not your hopes that need tempering, but your expectations. It’s not your goals that need abandoning, but your ideas of how those goals must be realized. Because your dreams are not a blueprint for your success. They are a sign that your purpose has a pulse. They are proof that a life of meaning and contribution is alive within you, pulling you forward, inviting you to step into some new version of yourself that you had never before been able to see. Sometimes the journey is uncertain and unsettling. Sometimes things need to be destroyed before they can be rebuilt. Sometimes the getting up is far more painful than the falling down. But friends? A single defeat is never the same thing as a final defeat. Want to know how I know? You’re still standing.
Love Your Limitations: Without Them, You Would Never Grow
It can be tempting to want to drop out of life when we feel stuck. To blame our discontent on our circumstances: the opportunities that slipped through our fingertips, the friends who betrayed us, the business ventures we were never able to get off the ground. We tell ourselves that once we have more time, or more money, or more energy, or better health -- then we will be unstoppable. As soon as we figure out how to shake the limitations, break free of the restrictions, clear all the hurdles — then our lives will begin. The problem, of course, is that if it weren’t for the hurdles, we’d never even know we could jump. Love Your Limitations: Without Them, You Would Never Grow For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin— real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life. -- Alfred D. Souza Truth is, it’s often when we are the most free, the most available, with the most options in front of us, that we also tend to feel the most stuck: We're shown a blank page and suddenly we get writer's block; we're given an entire day to ourselves and spend most of it struggling to decide what to do; we receive a financial windfall from an unexpected source and end up torturing ourselves over how to spend it. We need the limitations. In fact, it's often our restrictions, not our freedoms, that most challenge us to get creative and think outside the box. It's the constraints that push us past the limits of what we previously thought possible. It's the stumbling blocks that provoke us and irritate us and otherwise antagonize us into getting up off the couch and finally creating something that wasn't there before. A path. A plan. A life. It’s the feeling of not having enough that sparks our desire to create more of what we need. It’s the feeling of not being enough that forces us to confront our ideas of who we are and what we’re being called to do. And usually, it's only once we finally get tired of our own hemming and hawing that we are able to make the difficult but necessary choice to stop waiting for the life we want and instead, start creating it. So what does this mean for you? And what does this mean for me? And what does this mean for all of the world’s weary travelers who are just so darn tired of pushing against their circumstances in an effort to change them? I’m beginning to think that maybe it’s not the circumstances that need changing, after all. Maybe it’s us. Maybe we actually need the tight budgets. The compressed timelines. The loss. The grief. The chronic conditions we may never overcome or understand. Maybe we need the writing prompts, the challenging relationships, the rigid schedules, the bureaucratic red tape — maybe we need all of it. For the simple reason that every limitation we encounter also happens to be an invitation to grow.
Stress Is a Symptom of Our Resistance to Change
Stress. We know it from its crushing grip. We identify it by its crippling weight. Its not-so-subtle waves of exhaustion and overwhelm. Its tell-tale undercurrent of anxiety about the future, mixed with paralyzing fear that the other shoe is about to drop. Stress Is a Symptom of Our Resistance to Change And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. -- Anaïs Nin (more quotes) Hans Selye, the Austrian-Canadian physiologist and researcher who first coined the term “stress” in the 1930s defined it this way: “Stress is the nonspecific response of the body to any demand for change.” Put another way, it’s not the events in our lives that cause the stress -- it’s our resistance to them. It’s not our circumstances; it’s our unmet expectations, tangled up in our ideas of what should have been. It’s not the changes, themselves; it’s our refusal to accept them when they arise. It's not that we are powerless; it's that we are choosing to honor the "devil we know" at all costs, even if that means resigning ourselves to a life spent forcing square pegs into round holes. But the truth is, stress isn’t a sickness to manage -- it's a symptom of our greater disease. A sign that our old ways of doing things are no longer working. A signal that we’re being invited to transform in some major (and therefore, uncomfortable) way, but are refusing to answer the call. So today, friends, let’s vow not to ignore these whispers, but to listen for them. To honor them. To choose to see them for what they really are: an invitation to grow. Because stress is nothing more than a sign that our presence is being requested. It’s how we respond that matters.