Letting Go: A Transitional Necessity to Change

Lake Kokanee - Lake Cushman property near the Olympic National Park

  I remember sitting in a friend’s boat on Lake Washington on Labor Day evening. We had finished a wonderful summer day on the lake, enjoying sunshine, good food and close friendship conversations. Our emotions were as golden as the setting sun we watched turning the clouds a kaleidoscope of color like a slide show across the sky, the ascending crescent moon making its own statement of wonder. The next day I would begin another academic year as a professor at a nearby university. The beginning of tasks that often maxed out my bandwidth. This was my moment of calm before a storm I loved!

            I remember Mama’s Fish House in Maui. Our finale’ ritual, when visiting this beautiful island, was our dinner at Mama’s while watching the sun set. We would linger over the beauty, the wonderful food, talking about the memories we had created. All this knowing that the next day was the packing up, the difficult flight home and the rain for the next following months.

            Letting go is a transitional necessity for change to occur. We experience letting go or as some call it “loss” throughout our lifetime. Even at birth we let go of the cozy uterus that does all of our needed tasks effortlessly – but then there is life on the “other side”. You can’t be born of you don’t let go of the uterus!

            Sometime the transition of letting go of something wonderful for something else wonderful. Other transitions you let go of wonderful for a more disparaging context – like winter. Sometimes what comes after the letting go is totally unknown. It will be something you create. When I left my life in the Seattle area and moved to a Portland, Oregon suburb to be closer to my kids, I let go of a home, a therapy practice, my friends and support and a context I was familiar with to a new way of living with routines, relationships and even a job as yet unformed. So, something wonderful, something much less wonderful and something unknown – regardless, you have to let go.

            I am in the process of letting go of a piece of land in the Olympics that has been in my life and the family’s life for over 30 years. I have found solitude, comfort, laughter, joy, peace and a knowing on this spot of earth like no other in my lifetime. I had become my most sacred space. My heartstrings are tied to every tree and bush, every critter that has crossed my path – every pesky pug that has irritated and bit me! I have loved it all. Yet the time has come to let it go. How do you disentangle yourself from something your heartstrings hold so dear?

I sat on my bench, looking out over the sparkling lake, the cascading mountains and surrounding forest. This might sound odd, but suddenly, out of a breath of insight I decided to ask all that surrounded me how to deal with the letting go. As clear as a voice in my head came the wisdom “Everything you have received here cannot be taken away.” Awed by these wise words, I will carry them in my heart as I let go of this spot of earth, as I take on and create my next and as I feel all of the emotions that flow through my body.

  The gifts given to me here are mine forever. Letting go does not change that fact. These gifts are forever mine.