Letting Go of Lists
Friday, November 30, 2012 at 3:00 AM "The ebb and flow of life.
Expansion and contraction.
Opening up and closing in.
Warming of heart and chilling of soul.
Hanging on and letting go."
~Kayce S. Hughlett
As I Lay Pondering
The holiday season can be a tricky one to navigate. Oh let's face it, LIFE can be tricky to navigate, especially if we think we're the ones in charge and perfection with a capital P is the ultimate mission. We make a list and check it twice, three times, to infinity... and then what? Things change or don't go as we planned! The only thing we can control is how we perceive the changes.
The past few months have been an internal time for me, which was a considerably different direction than I had originally conceived. Plans to travel to Italy and Vienna this fall proved too difficult to manage and were thus abandoned. A course scheduled for October was pushed to November, another one cancelled altogether. I thought I would do a big campaign for As I Lay Pondering and write blog posts every week; expand my professional "reach" and push myself further into the external world. Those things didn't happen.
Instead, my life turned blessedly inward. My personal challenge then became whether or not I would consider the items that fell off my list as failures or could I welcome what showed up in their place. I chose the latter.
Had I pressed for Europe, I would not have experienced the wildness of silence and nature found in a 10-day meditation retreat. An October class wouldn't have filled with its perfect group of participants and there wouldn't have been time for "novel" ideas and a week of dedicated writing on a lovely barren, fog-filled hillside. Maybe I would have sold a few more books... maybe not. Living life backwards is impossible. I don't know what the preceding months would have offered had I pushed for a more external experience. My hunch is I would be entering this current season exhausted and depleted instead of exhilarated with life expanding in juicy new ways. Ways I did not imagine earlier in the year. Ways that weren't on my original list.
We make a list. Set an intention. Put a course of action into motion. (All which I highly recommend!) The question is can we then let go and welcome what actually shows up?
reprint from November newsletter
Reader Comments (1)
Kayce,
Love the line: "Living life backwards is impossible."
That's some common sense profundity. So grounded to the present and real living, bumps, bruises, and all, and not the tyranny of woulda, coulda, shoulda.