Letting Go
I was listening to a documentary about Joni Mitchell. I was struck by something she wrote in a telegram to her partner when she felt her free artistic spirit was starting to be constrained:
If you hold sand too tightly, it will slip through your fingers.
It's often like that when we cling too tightly to things. Relationships, status, possessions — they risk slipping through our hands. The more value we place on them, the more we cling. It's almost as if we're inviting a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Moreover, we squeeze the joy and beauty out of what we hold dear when our grip is too strong. What we have here and now is neglected by thoughts of what we "must do" to keep it, and what might happen if we don't do it. We stand with one foot in the present and the other in an imaginary future.
We can never know what the future holds. We can secure things as much as possible, nothing wrong with that, but we must be open to the fact that life is, after all, transient and unpredictable. There is a beauty in that too, if we accept that inevitable truth. We become more open and receptive to our surroundings.
When we let go, we begin to let in.
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