The concept of letting go is slowly creeping into the every
day vernacular of the 21st century. It is a natural response to the over stressed,
over scheduled and consumer driven society we live in. If you aren’t familiar
with the song “Let It Go” from the
recent Disney film, Frozen, then you
are definitely not a parent or grandparent of a youngster under the age of 12.
What I love about the song, besides the fact that my adorable 3-year-old grandchild
can belt out the tune verbatim, is that it is teaching a very important
practice.
A more spiritual equivalent -- detachment, also expressed as
non-attachment, is a state in which a person overcomes his or her attachment to
desire for things, people or concepts of the world and thus attains a heightened perspective. Many world religions have
doctrines that teach this idea of letting go, including Zen Buddhism, which
speaks specifically to non-attachment of our thoughts. Certainly most world
religions support the concept of detaching from worldly possessions and ideas.
While I am not about to become a monk and retreat from my
life, I am interested in the idea of detachment. In the secular world, letting
go is a concept that teaches us that holding on too tightly to anything can
result in an inability to grow and change. Even holding on to physical objects
can thwart our ability to leave space for something more relevant and useful.
This past month I helped an old friend liquidate a storage unit “stuffed with
stuff” from the Mesa, AZ home she had lived in for over 30 years. She had
retired from teaching at ASU and had decided to move to Bali, Indonesia. It was
certainly over due as she had been paying on this storage unit for over 10
years, mostly because every time she thought about what to do with it, she
would crawl into the world of denial and write the check for yet another month.
When she finally decided that the storage unit and all her beloved objects were
not going to magically disappear or arrive at her doorstep she made a decision to let them go -- but not
without a struggle. I witnessed the stages of grief as she begrudgingly let go
of “her life in AZ” one agonizing step at a time. For me it was a valuable lesson on how and
why we hang on to things that no longer serve us –the physical and the metaphysical.
You may not think of letting go as being related to
creativity or art but I assure you it is inexorably connected to artful living.
Julie Burstein’s Ted Talk articulates many aspects of how letting go is
essential to the creative process.
At the LA Art Book fair, this past weekend, my friend Kate
said to me, “ fondle and release” as I lusted after a particularly beautiful book that
I neither needed nor could afford. This
expression is my new mantra. I would put it on a t-shirt and wear it every day
but it could get me in some trouble, if you know what I mean…
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