Letting Go

It's a little after 4:30am.  I should be sleeping, because it's still dark outside.  But I'm awake enough to have decided that I may not be able to get back to sleep.  So, here I am.

I do need to leave here by 7 or so to be at my storage unit by 8.  That's the real reason for the trip.  The message that the universe has been sending lately has been "Simplify" and I have been getting that loud and clear.  A second message is also equally as obvious to me -  "Let Go".  Obvious - yes.  Simple - no.

I am mentally girding myself to let go of a number of things.  I've done it before and find it's not one of those thing that you do, and over time it gets easier.  I can go through a list of crushing "Let Go" processes including my marriage, my early relationship with my son, my sense of self, friends....and I can say without hesitation that molting of things over a lifetime, even things we think we need or want, happens.  The only question is how long we try to hold on, and how we come to peace with letting go.

I've got people in my life - people I truly love - who will never be able to be there for me when I need them to.  I'm not saying I need to let go of the people necessarily.  But I do need to let go of some of my hopes when it comes to them.  This includes my mom.

I've got "stuff".  Things.  Tangible belongings that I've kept but haven't used in a long tine.  I have always expected to bring them all to wherever I move to as part of nesting to build a home.  I'm not so sure about that anymore, and I need to let go of much of it.

I've got a career.  Where I'm living now doesn't serve it well.  I've known that for a while, but for the past year I've been able to delay what I had hoped wasn't the inevitable.  So I strongly suspect I'll need to let go of something there - either where I'm happily living right now, or the main way I've learned to earn a living over the years.

And I've got baggage.  Things I've held on to over the years just because.  But the more we continue to hold onto old things the less our capacity to embrace new things.  So that difficult mental work of truly putting some things down and walking away is important.  Ironically, it seems that when all is going smoothly we rarely find the time to do all this stuff - it's when we're forced to consider life direction that the weight of it all becomes so apparent.  And, that's where we are.

I am enjoying my time here.  I went to church yesterday which was very pleasant.  My friend Laura had her boyfriend over and we had a nice dinner.  I went to the gym to work off some of my energy.  And my mind is working on overdrive while it chews on all of this stuff.  Thus - here I am writing instead of sleeping.

I suppose all of this falls under a larger heading of "change".  I have become relatively accustomed to change over the years.  But I wish it weren't so and I'm hoping to steady things out for a while.  The real questions is what I'm ready to let go of to do that.  Not things I think I can let got of, but things I'm truly ready to move on without.

The very first time I saw a therapist about my gender "stuff" in 1986 the outcome was validation of my situation, a well as a very important talk about what I need to be ready to risk to truly embrace it.  In a word, I needed to be ready to lose everything.  Over the next few weeks I realized that I wasn't at that point and, in fact, held on for another dozen years or so.  But I see a difference in making decisions that then cause other people to do things resembling "Letting Go", and making the decisions yourself to let go.

That's all probably way too deep for 5 something in the morning, but there you have it.  That's the reason for my week here.  Time and space to think and make some plans.  Space to begin letting go of "stuff".  And, in some ways, closure.

The trailer for the next movie from the siblings that brought us the Matrix was recently released.  The movie is titled Cloud Atlas, and from the looks of the clips and the discussions it's going to be quite the event.




As with the Matrix, I can already tell that some of the themes and the lines resonate fairly deeply with me.  One in particular from this trailer is relevant to the discussion on Letting Go:

"Our lives and our choices, each encounter, suggests a new potential direction."

With that - I'll turn the light off and try to get a little ore sleep.  I have a feeling I'm going to need it.