On Letting Go
“If you cling too tightly, you’re gonna lose control.”
Every year around this time we start to see a deluge of memes about how awful the past year was or social media posts telling us to “let go of things that no longer serve us.” It’s the season of decluttering, not just of our spaces but also of our minds and our lives.
I wholeheartedly support this mental and emotional purge, amongst all the pressures to stay and fight, to never quit, and to never give up - sometimes we just need to let go. My problem with all these memes is that they only tell us half the story. There’s a sense this advice is in preparation for something better to come. We have to breathe out the bad to make room for the good. In these soundbites and eloquent quotes we learn to let go of the negative, the toxic, the outdated. What happens when it’s time to let go of something good?
At some point during my transcon run in 2017, I asked my partner to never let me be the person who only ever talks about the time I ran across the country. I thought it was a bit “braggy” and all around obnoxious to keep talking about the same cool thing you did years ago. But more than that, I was terrified to let that be my swan song. I wanted my life and stories to have just a bit more diversity (more on that later).
When I finished the run I struggled with the transition. I always struggle with transitions. I struggled with finding a purpose, the discipline and schedule of the crossing. I certainly struggled with running and I struggled with the creeping longing that quickly swelled into a torrent of nostalgia - I was almost homesick for the days I had hated.
Luckily I’ve been some level of homesick for my entire adult life, so I knew what I had to do - find a new project, a new goal, and start working like crazy to accomplished it. So I did. I dove into (too much) work and finishing that awful dissertation. I let running go for a bit and focused on the non-athletic pursuits of my life.
Only now do I realize how this saved my mental health and likely a number of my relationships (including the one with running). Letting go allowed me to move on. Letting go of the good let me move on. It allowed me to start running across states without trying to relive the crossing. It allowed me to hike the PCT without constantly comparing the experience to one that was already gone.
Still, it wasn’t without challenge. Letting go is HARD, and here’s the less than inspiring point that must be made, letting go doesn’t always mean something better is going to come. Those motivational quotes are nice thoughts, but it’s just not reality. It’s not always about making space for what can happen to you, sometimes it is just about moving forward - maybe to something worse, maybe to something more challenging, or just to something that is different. The point is moving forward.
In moving forward, in letting go of what’s passed - good or bad - we honor those experiences, we preserve them. I’ve found the quickest way to kill a good thing is to try and recreate it. It’s why remakes are so often so terrible (looking at you Cats). It’s why I refuse to reread my favorite books, because reading a book isn’t about the story in the pages, it’s about experiencing a story, and you can never experience something the same way twice. We saw this on the trail. We met a number of folks returning to the PCT after a previous year of hiking, eager at the start of the season to relive the magic of the trail. With each mile, the moments they were trying to recapture recessed further and further, a retreating wave lost to an ocean of memory. By struggling to match the steps and connections of last year, they ruined the very experience they were trying to recreate, and perhaps even sadder, they missed out on the unique experience of now.
We’ve all done this. We’ve longed for the easy days of high school, or get back to our pre-injury PRs, or tried to hold on to that fluttering feeling of a new relationship. We compare our first dates with our 50th. We keep looking back to how good it was, turning our backs to how good it is now. We know how to let go of a relationship that is over, but it’s much harder to let go of a relationship with someone or something you still love, with someone or something that you still intend to be with. It’s hard, but necessary, to let go of the relationship you had then to be present in the relationship you have now. Foundations are just that - foundations, in order to build on them, we have to let them be. We call it change, evolution, or growth - but we don’t ever acknowledge that all that requires letting go, because we’re taught that letting go is sad, and maybe it is. But it’s also necessary and can be liberating.
Esther Pearl, a relationship expert who specializes in infidelity, gives the same advice to couples looking to repair their marriage after an affair. She tells them that their first marriage is over, now they have to determine if they want a second one.
This is beyond good advice, and not just for relationships that suffer a major event like an affair, or the addition of a child, or a cross-country run - but for all relationships and all changes. Every single day our relationships change. Experiences end and new ones begin. We can’t hold on to the passing time too tightly and we can’t pull our past into our present. We can’t relive our first dates or favorite races. We can’ t even know that something better is right around the corner.
What we can do is honor those experiences by leaving them where they are, by carrying their lessons forward to today, and by knowing that they are woven in the fabric of who we are today. We don’t run backwards, we let go of that last mile and all the ones before that, and move forward.