Old journal entry (December 2018) on letting go.
You’re a kid in a stroller, with a toy steering wheel. You’re being driven around and playing with your wheel. You end up at the playground, are happy and think you had something to do with the outcome. Next time, you do your steering again. This time you end up in a ditch and are unhappy. You resolve to pay more attention to your steering next time.
After some time you start to believe this whole steering business is very important. Your knuckles turn a little white as you grip, and grip and grip.
You start to believe that things will go very badly if you were to let go. So you don’t! You are proud of your accomplishments and ashamed of your failures. You are worried about the future and have regrets about the past. And you never, ever let go.
… just let go.
Of all responsibility. Stop the pretence that the you in your head is doing anything. It isn’t. Your mind is claiming all the doing after the fact. All of it!
Nothing will change. You will still be driving around in your stroller. You will have your pretend steering wheel. Only your perception of reality will be different.
Stress, blame, guilt, anxiety, anger, they will all evaporate.
It’s nice.
Just let go…
A little smile came to my face. I saw myself as the kid in the stroller. I am still the kid in the stroller. I just finished a book (the road less travelled) where the complete opposite claim was made: you need to take full responsibility. I would like to fall back to the lessons I learned during the high school lessons in Latin: to take the middle road.