Rest When Needed.

Here's a heady mantra: 

let go. 

It's solid advice. Don't cling to your past. Release what no longer serves you up the good stuff. Cut that cord and you'll find yourself flung forward, all open air and open vistas greeting you.  I'm down with this plan. I've been working damn hard to do it. For a very long time, I thought it was the only solution, really, to a heavy heart. I learned well how to avoid people, places, things that brought up those deep snatches of memory, those currents of time tucked away. I've been getting good at letting go for a good long while now. Then I had a visitor come visiting. I didn't want to see him, at first. (Fear.) I'd gotten good at avoiding this reunion, and I justified the fleeing by saying,  

listen here, I'm letting go.

Ultimately, the visitor won out. And we drove through clear country and met on a street corner. Here's what I found: someone I knew by heart who I didn't know at all. And for the first time in a long time, I began to doubt this whole letting go thing. At least, the way I've been trying to do it.  

Could be: Letting go isn't about running or hiding. 
Could be that it's not about erasing. 
Quite possibly, it's not about clearing away the rubble.

I've been writing this little blog for almost a year now, and when I started it, it was because my heart was heavy. I had to write because to write meant to release, to let go. And it's true that I was holding on to a heady mess. (You've no doubt seen some of it, so bless you.) Funny how we get used to playing certain parts, certain roles. For a long time I let myself be heavy, because I was. I let myself do the 'broken' thing, because I was a broken thing. I did this for a long, long time (though never too long--no measuring healing in life; the time it takes is the time it takes). I played the part for so long that I started to worry when I began feeling light again (for surely, the lightness was a trick. Surely any steady step would only prove my overeager heart). Then I drove through clear country, and met someone on a street corner. And my heart was no longer heavy. But truth be told, it hadn't been that way for awhile; I just hadn't been ready to give up the role I'd perfected, the lines I'd long memorized. 

There is no great epiphany. There is not one single revelation. Not that I can see, anyway. There's only the even progression into new territory, so steady and slow and wide that it's impossible not to look back and take stock of what you've left behind. Look back and it's all always there, as you've left it, as you've known it.  

You don't have to let it go. 
In fact, please don't. 
Just keep moving forward. 
Rest when needed.

Maybe letting go should be about finding a way to love the rubble of our wreckage, to accept every shard stuck beneath our skin. Skin scars over, eventually. And people like to ask questions about scars; think of everything you can turn and look back at, even from a distance. Think of all the stories you can tell. 



Thanks for reading. 


Beth