Letting go

Learning when to let go is one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. Of course it sits upon a long list of other very difficult things that I've struggled with but have still come through the other side, able to display trophy bruises from all the times I've stumbled along the way.
I hit my thirties smarter and more self aware than I had been the decade before and a large part of me becoming the woman I am now was learning how to let go.

Over the years I have let go of friends I had out grown which is never easy but sometimes you find your lives are no longer in the same place and you run out of things to chat about it as common ground becomes harder to find and then you find yourself drifting. It's best to not fight it for the same of whatever it was that you used to have because in life there's no going back only forward, the power of now and all that jazz (I'm sure Eckhart Tolle would not mind me paraphrasing his philosophy as such).

 I remember we used to have all these Buddhist books lying around my parents house full of zen teachings because my dad has more than a passing interest in Eastern Philosophy and I read one of those stories about two Buddhist monks who were walking through the countryside when they came to a river and by the side of the river was a women who was afraid to cross so one of the monks picked her up and carried her across (I'm guessing they are not supposed to have much contact with women). A few miles down the road the other monk turns to him and asks why did you carry that women across the stream and he replies I set her down on the other side, why are you still carrying her. Because if stories are to believed then everything Zen monks say to each other is deep and meaningful. Clearly there are no conversations about how sore their feet are from all the walking or what they will have for lunch because they are so zen but I think my point there was about letting go. 

Sometimes what is harder than letting go of friends or unhappy relationships is ideas particularly the one's you hold about yourself. When I lost weight I found the hardest part was stopping from seeing myself how I used to look and realizing this picture of myself in my head was no longer accurate. Letting go of beliefs is almost always a struggle because there will be a part of you that has built your whole notion of self around this set of beliefs and when you start to question that it has the potential to be devastating. I have worked and in fact am still working on my core beliefs in an effort to find a better me and damn it sometimes I just want to crawl beneath my duvet and eat biscuits. I am learning to let go because somethings just weigh you down in life and dammit I want to be like that first Buddhist monk. He was infinitely cooler