The sacred art of letting go
If there is one constant in life, it must be change. As much as we tend to avoid it, a huge part of being human is allowing things to shift, to morph.
And perhaps what we are most attached to is knowing what the outcome of said change will be. Though it’s quite silly, when you think about it, isn’t it? How can we possibly know what the end result will be? There are just too many variables. So we tend to stay in our comfort zones, to cling to what we know. Then we don’t have to worry about how things will turn out, as we believe we are headed toward a certain outcome, a well-defined finish line. If we follow all the rules, we will be happy. Or successful. Or safe. Maybe all three.
That’s what we are taught, anyway.
This tendency to hold on to what we have begins early in life. There’s a story I often tell about this:
In 2015, just before I flew to South Africa for the first time, I visited my childhood village on Cape Cod. One sunny autumn afternoon, I found my way to Dowse’s Beach where I’d learned to swim as a child. It’s a long, flat beach where I’d spent many childhood days looking for shells, so I happily set out to walk the length of it as the sun began to lower in the sky. It was off-season and late in the day, the sun just beginning to think about setting and the air starting to cool down. The beach was all but deserted, this late in the season. In the distance to my right, there was just one beach blanket spread on the sand, with a young mother sprawled out on it, taking a catnap from what I could see. To my left and an equal distance away, there was a little boy, maybe three years old, sandy and brown from the sun. His hair was tousled and his long oversized tee shirt damp and even sandier. He’d pulled the bottom of the shirt up to form a pouch which was bulging and likely the cause of his very slow gait.
I knew from my own childhood experiences that it would be full of shells, rocks and sea glass and I smiled at him but he didn’t see me. He had stopped all of a sudden and was looking down at the sand. From my vantage point I could see there was a very large conch shell just in front of his bare little feet. These days, it is immensely rare to find a whole one like that, completely intact, and for a minute I was envious. He glanced to his mother in the distance, looked down at his very full shirt pouch, and back at the shell. It was clearly What He Had Always Wanted. The Mother of All Seashells. And yet, he didn’t want to lose anything he had. So he did what any child would do, and started crying so hard that his mother came to rescue him. I’m sure she thought he had hurt himself, yet he was only dealing with the agony of giving up what he had in order to get what he wanted.
I wonder how many times you’ve felt this way, to one degree or another? For me, I know I felt much this way toward the end of my first trip to South Africa. I had come and gone walkabout for an entire month by myself, something I’d never done in my whole life. A couple days into my visit, I was standing on a big flat rock on the side of a small dam somewhere in the wilds of the Western Cape. The woolly-necked storks flew back and forth in the pale blue sky as the sun began to rise. I thought of that little boy on the beach, far across the Atlantic, in that moment and often in the remaining days, as I fell more and more in love with South Africa. I had known change was coming, I just didn’t know what a huge transformation I would go through. In the midst of so much joy, there was also the pain of leaving people and places I’d loved so much in order to be in the place I hardly knew yet had always known was home – since I was the age of the boy on the beach. To embrace this overwhelming desire to stay in South Africa would take some reprogramming. Maybe a lot of reprogramming. And a whole lot of letting go. But once I had seen the possibility of living here? There was no way to fit back into my old life.
That is life, isn’t it? While the story of the boy and the shell has a very clear path forward, often change is murkier, more complicated. And it requires shedding what no longer serves us. I trust you’ll find your way to clarity about what it is you can let go of – maybe a bit of writing out what’s ready to go on little slips of paper and burning them is a good place to start. Or maybe just sitting with what you know now. So much of it is just recognising that it’s time.
As we walk through this Metamorphosis process together, and all the shifting going on in our world simultaneously, I hope you’ll let yourself release what doesn’t serve you, what is no longer yours to carry, so that you can accept the gifts to come. With open arms and broken open hearts, may we all allow ourselves to embrace what we have always wanted.
Christa Gumede Buthelezi
