Letting Go vs. Holding on: Treading the Fine Line
Staying in a more privileged part of the world brings with it an intuitive assumption of being in control of every aspect that touches your physical being. But witnessing the helplessness most of the people experience when it comes to the fluctuating moods of the weather, hammers home the realization that some things are beyond so called incumbents of superpower also.
This also reinforces my belief in the fact that there are some facets of life where resistance is simply futile. The trick is to learn when to hold on and when to let go.
The holding on must be to the time and extent that it provides you the drive to push yourself just a little harder. What Peter Senge writes in ‘Fifth Discipline’ as the creative tension that generates as a result of your vision and your reality pulling in opposite directions. The ‘holding on’ to your vision must help you maintain that creative tension sans there would be no act of intellectual creation in the world. Holding on must also be to the feeling of achievement a delicious relief that you would have experienced multiple times after an honest effort. This would keep you warm when the winds of reality are the coldest tugging at every strand of your being to give up….the holding on to that warm feeling of making it through would provide you with that burst of energy latent in all of us.
The letting go part is more difficult because it requires a special effort and conditioning to overcome our natural instincts of clinging on. Most of us, without realizing, get a marijuana-high on feeling like a victim – so we make sacrifices but want credit for that, we give up so that we can blame fate for that and we hold onto the feeling of loss of a loved one because the sadist in us like this feeling of self pity. The words might seem harsh but most of us fall into this trap of adorning the robe of a victim and walking through life as if the cosmos has conspired to inflict all this adversity on us. The effort here should be to condition the mind to overcome this feeling by being aware of it and then consciously ‘letting go’ of it.
How we do it should be more through our intuition and gut rather than by succumbing to the whims of our mind. This also implies that we must learn to listen, to our body and our intuition - it would whisper when it is time to let go.
I read a quote by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar that sums it all up:
Life is like a roller coaster ride. If you resist you will feel dizzy and disoriented but if you have faith in the builder of the ride you end up having a great time!
Staying in a more privileged part of the world brings with it an intuitive assumption of being in control of every aspect that touches your physical being. But witnessing the helplessness most of the people experience when it comes to the fluctuating moods of the weather, hammers home the realization that some things are beyond so called incumbents of superpower also.
This also reinforces my belief in the fact that there are some facets of life where resistance is simply futile. The trick is to learn when to hold on and when to let go.
The holding on must be to the time and extent that it provides you the drive to push yourself just a little harder. What Peter Senge writes in ‘Fifth Discipline’ as the creative tension that generates as a result of your vision and your reality pulling in opposite directions. The ‘holding on’ to your vision must help you maintain that creative tension sans there would be no act of intellectual creation in the world. Holding on must also be to the feeling of achievement a delicious relief that you would have experienced multiple times after an honest effort. This would keep you warm when the winds of reality are the coldest tugging at every strand of your being to give up….the holding on to that warm feeling of making it through would provide you with that burst of energy latent in all of us.
The letting go part is more difficult because it requires a special effort and conditioning to overcome our natural instincts of clinging on. Most of us, without realizing, get a marijuana-high on feeling like a victim – so we make sacrifices but want credit for that, we give up so that we can blame fate for that and we hold onto the feeling of loss of a loved one because the sadist in us like this feeling of self pity. The words might seem harsh but most of us fall into this trap of adorning the robe of a victim and walking through life as if the cosmos has conspired to inflict all this adversity on us. The effort here should be to condition the mind to overcome this feeling by being aware of it and then consciously ‘letting go’ of it.
How we do it should be more through our intuition and gut rather than by succumbing to the whims of our mind. This also implies that we must learn to listen, to our body and our intuition - it would whisper when it is time to let go.
I read a quote by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar that sums it all up:
Life is like a roller coaster ride. If you resist you will feel dizzy and disoriented but if you have faith in the builder of the ride you end up having a great time!
posted by Garima at 9:53 AM
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