Why Is It So Hard to Let Go?

The other day I asked a bus driver when her bus was leaving. She was sitting in the driver’s seat eating a sandwich. “I'm on my break,” she said. “Look at the schedule!” She sounded annoyed. I apologized for interrupting her break. "Look at the schedule!" she said again, emphatically. The annoyance had a swipe of anger.

It would have been so easy for her to say, “Five minutes,” or “Ten minutes,” or whatever the answer was. Instead, she spent more time being irritated. I got pulled into her emotional riptide. I felt upset.

I caught a different bus on a different line. The second driver waited patiently while I loaded my bicycle onto the front of the bus. But once I was sitting on the bus, I kept thinking about the first driver. In my head I was running through everything I wanted to say to her: What’s wrong with you? Why couldn’t you just answer the question? Why is it so hard to be a little bit nice? I was still angry.

Here I was, already on another bus, well on my way, with a driver who had been nice, but I was still in the past, on the first bus. Why is it so hard to let go?

We Hold On for Dear Life

The Buddha said human suffering has three causes: clinging, aversion, and ignorance.

Clinging: We want things to be a certain way. Aversion: We don’t want things to be a certain way. Ignorance: We don’t understand that nothing is permanent.

Everything is changing. Everything is in constant transformation. Every moment is a new moment. Every breath is a new breath. Yet we hold on for dear life.

We hold on because we think everything is ours. My body. My house. My work. My relationship. My children. My life. But what if this life isn’t something we own? What if we are part of this life?

We are part of nature. Everything in nature grows from a seed, develops, matures, and then returns to nature. Constant transformation. It's hard for us to let go because we identify with the physical world without realizing it's always changing. We hold on mostly out of fear.

What Happens When We Can’t Let Go?

Today I heard that a former student at the high school where I’m consulting had attempted suicide. One of his teachers, whom I’m training as a performance specialist, was deeply shaken.

She immediately began looking backward. What could I have done last year? How could I have helped him? Should I have known? These are understandable questions. When something terrible happens, the mind wants to go backward and change what has already occurred. But we can’t.

A close cousin of mine called to tell me that her dear friend, who's terminally ill, chose to end his life through assisted suicide. How difficult this was for everyone who loved him and didn’t want him to die. They wanted him to stay. He chose to go.

How do we let go of someone we love when we don’t want to let go? Here again is the challenge of moving into the ever-unfolding present instead of holding on to something, or someone, who has passed.

This is the great challenge of life: to live in the present moment. To accept what is without wishing it were different. Acceptance doesn’t mean that we don’t care or that we don’t act. It means accepting what is going on right now and asking: What now? Not: Why did this happen? Not: Why didn’t I do something differently? Instead, we should be asking: What now?

Learning to Swim in the Ocean of Life

If learning to let go, accept change, and stay in the present is among life's great challenges, where are we supposed to learn how to do that?

We’re never taught this stuff. We’re never taught how to swim in life's ocean. We are taught so many peripheral things: trigonometry, history, DNA. We spend years looking at the way things work without learning how to deal with what life actually brings us.

Spirituality Essential Reads

What Is Spiritual Jazz?

Why the Mind Needs an Afterlife

How do you deal with disappointment? With loss? With fear? How do you let go of someone you love who dies? How do you stay present when everything inside you wants the present moment to be different?

We teach young people how to pass tests without teaching them how to meet the tests that life itself will give them. We need a revolution in our teaching and in how we prepare people for life.

There Is Nothing to Hold On To

Stress is a function of disconnection from the present moment, from ourselves, from other people, and from what matters most.

The first bus driver was gone. The bus was gone. The interaction was over. But I was still carrying it. I was dealing with what had already happened and wishing it had happened differently.

Clinging. Aversion. Ignorance.

And then there was another bus. Another driver. Another moment. Life had already moved on. The question was whether I was willing to move with it.

Maybe that is what letting go really means. Not pushing something away. Not pretending it didn’t happen. Not denying grief, anger, disappointment, or fear.

It means coming back to what is here. This breath. This person. This challenge. This moment.

We don’t own any of it. Instead, we are part of it.

There is nothing to hold on to and everything to gain.

We give our lives to service. We accept. We grow. We serve.

Coda

Just before I submitted this post, I stopped at a local store. The lit sign in the window said OPEN, but when I tried the door, the shopkeeper said, “We’re not open yet.”

I pointed out that the OPEN sign was lit. “I’m turning it off," he said angrily. "We're not open."

Rather than argue, I left but immediately started thinking about all the nasty, angry things I wanted to say to him. Just like the bus driver.

But this time I caught it fast. I exhaled. I felt my feet on the ground.

The sun was bright. A new moment.