On Holding On…
By Cara Chang Mutert
Every fall, the turning of the leaves and the brilliance of the season offers us a stunning reminder of nature’s seasonal shift into letting go. The trees make it look so easy, and beautiful to boot.
So much of life revolves around the idea of letting go, and yet we as humans really struggle with it. I’ll admit, I’m a clinger. After recently going through the process of emptying two homes collectively holding 70 years of memories, I’ve caught myself holding on to seemingly inconsequential pieces of nothing, over and over again. Things like, a shred of paper that my now adult daughter quickly scribbled out for me when she was little, “Went to the pond,” with a little heart drawn before her name. Or the fur hat that once donned my father’s cool head, or an old engineering textbook with his name handwritten on the inside cover.
It's so hard to let go. A lot of it stems from precious memories and the warm feelings that are conjured up along with that time in our lives. Whether we’re letting go of a thing, a memory, a person, or a place, none of it is easy. Yet as my mother reminds me, “Sometimes, the pain is necessary.”
Wish it could be as beautiful as the golden and bright red hues the trees bestow upon us each fall. The natural world makes it all look so easy and effortless. Yet for us humans, it’s not. It can get messy, and sometimes ugly. It can be unfair and infuriating, it can be deeply sad and excruciating. But nature’s yearly cycle of life, death, and rebirth paints for us such an everchanging portrait of the beauty of acceptance.
In yoga, the always changing nature of life is referred to as Prakriti. It’s one of the few things we can count on to always be the case. The practice of yoga is designed to calm these entropic tendencies of nature and the world around us, and in the heart and mind within us. Through the physical practice of yoga and meditation, our hope is to still the currents of constantly churning mind as we try to adapt to the continually revolving world around us.
The human tendency for us to attach praise or blame to any given situation can intensify our thoughts and feelings. But playing the part of the victim or the assailant is just another self-coping mechanism that moves us further away from what we’re working to manifest through the practice of yoga: contentment and acceptance. Catching ourselves in the process in lies the rub.
Finding a sense of contentment (santosha), acceptance, and gratitude for the moment, despite the circumstance, is the practice. Even when the seas are thrashing around you and as a result, usually also within you, our work is to remain grounded in what is, regardless of what the future may hold, or what the past may have been.
For me, the blessings in any given moment of my life are absolutely family, friends, community, health, nature and blue skies. When things are looking especially bleak, I fall back on how thankful I am to have fresh air to breathe, clean water to drink, hot showers, food in the fridge, a working furnace, and a roof above our heads. It comes down to the simple things that so many live without that can keep us rooted and appreciative of our everyday gifts.
The practice of letting go remains an ongoing lifetime practice. But when you get mired in the details of ultimately meaningless bumps and valleys in the road, focusing on gratitude can makes it a little easier to ride it out...
Still, I’m keeping my little scrap of paper.
