Exposure and letting go

Letting go because you know you are being prepared for your new adventures. By letting go you trust that you now know you have learned the important lessons and are ready to move towards them.

Do you remember being a kid and thinking “I don’t want anyone to know I have bodily fluids, emotions, or thoughts that are different than any other people. I only want the world to see I am perfect; super human and just like everyone else.” Did you have topics that were OFF limits, and anytime your parents or close friends even thought of bringing them up, you were mortified? Boy howdy! If they slipped and exposed anything other than what you wanted them to say, God help them! Didn’t it feel like you were in control? That is, until you weren’t.

I think these were the days where we thought we had the ultimate power to navigate our lives, but really, we needed to have faith and humility. Faith that we were enough, faith that we were loved as we were, faith that it will all work out in the end, and humility to know that no one is perfect. The reason we didn’t know this was a possible reality was because we were lacking experience. I know I hated it when my mom would say, “One day you will understand honey”, but you know what? My mom was right. She saw it was a level of immaturity and that I too would have to face my own humanness.

As I get older, I have started to realize that sometimes those things we didn’t want the world to see starts to slip out of our control no matter if we like it or not. We lose our ability to have CHOICE for when it comes. The funny part is that now I find enjoyment in the loss of this type of control. All you can do is laugh and enjoy the ride. Getting older, having children, the economy, and people are our greatest teachers of this reality.

I wonder why we resist with such vigor in those earlier years. I can’t help but think this may be the catalyst to much of our early life suffering. One thing I have learned is the things I held so dearly in early life now seem so trivial. I’ve learned that as I get older the losses can be much greater than I ever imagined like death, health issues, relationships, and systems collapse. Thank God we have learned from each stage of letting go so we now are better prepared for what we must face in our new reality.

When something in life feels threatening, the Fight-Flight-Freeze response makes a very quick assumption on how you should protect yourself. Maybe this time, change that thought to what my mom always told me, which was “One of the greatest gifts we can learn is to laugh at ourselves and learn to go with the flow”. It’s going to happen no matter whether you think you have control or not. All the pieces of the journey will come together at the very end. Let go of trying to understand it.

Enjoy the ride…