To live in this world, you must be able to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it against your bones knowing your life depends on it;
and when the time comes, to let it go.
— Mary Oliver
Holding On and Letting Go. Sounds simple enough. After all, we pick up things and put them down all the time. We’ve been doing that since we were old enough to know what hands are for. Of course, the things we can pick up and put down with our hands are the least of it. When our hearts and minds rather than our hands are doing the holding on or letting go, that’s when the problems begin.
Indeed, our hearts and minds have a remarkable and rather perverse way of tenaciously holding onto what most needs to be released and of failing grasp what we most yearn for. Complicating this matter even more is the fact that, in many ways, this business of deciding what to keep and what to discard changes a great deal over the course of time. Still, as Mary Oliver so beautifully reminds us, questions about holding on and letting go lie at the very core of what it means “to live in this world,” to embrace the human condition. And as my sense of the fragility of everything deepens and my sense of the fleeting quality of life grows with each passing year, I’m coming to understand ever more deeply just how important these questions are.
This is why, for example, I treasure even more than I did as a child growing up in a Jewish family, the Jewish teaching that it is this life – and not some life to come – that matters. That every event, whether playful or solemn, joyous or tearful, can be greeted with the same toast: “L’Chaim” – to life. This perspective continues to teach me about “loving what is mortal” and “holding it against my bones as if my life depended on it.” Judaism has also taught me that what I choose to do in the world is ultimately more important than what I believe. As a result, deciding how I choose to devote my time and energy – what I choose to hold on to – takes on a quality of profound importance and even of sacredness.
As perplexing and challenging as the problem of holding on is the equally difficult problem of letting go. Here I value most what I’ve learned from the teachings of the Buddhist tradition. Teachings about the impermanence of all things and the profound value of non-attachment. How to develop the capacity to “let go” or, as Unitarian Universalist minister Forrest Church puts it, “letting go for dear life.”
Learning about this business of letting go is also where some of the mystics of the world’s sacred traditions can be wonderful teachers. For example, I often think about Rumi’s poem about life being like a guesthouse:
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
First, we must open to hearts and minds to the steady stream of new arrivals at the guesthouse – all the joys and depressions and momentary insights – that show up unannounced every morning. Then, we need to accept Rumi’s advice that even if they’ve come to sweep away all my furniture, all of those things I’ve carefully held on to for such a long time, that I must still meet them honorably at the door. Not only meet them as they arrive, but greet them laughing and actually invite them in. After all, they’re not only relieving me of what I no longer need, but in the process of helping me let go, may also be opening space for some new kind of wonder.
And if questions about what to hold on to or what to let go of are challenging by themselves, how much more so when we consider that the greatest difficulty often lies in trying to do both at the same time. For one thing, it often seems that we can only find the time and energy to hold on to what matters is by letting go of what doesn’t. And then there’s the problem of holding on without clinging and trying to control other people or our own experiences. Sort of like the physical problem of patting one’s head while rubbing one’s stomach, holding on and letting go can take some serious spiritual coordination.
Finally, as Forrest Church poignantly reminds us, “When cast into the depths, to survive we must first let go of things that will not save us… and then we must reach out for the things that can.” Clearly, these questions about holding on and letting go take on a particular urgency in troubled times, times like those we find ourselves in today. In that spirit, I ask what you need to hold onto as if your life depended on it? And what do you need to let go of for dear life? May life guide us all in seeking answers to these questions and give us the faith and courage to live the answers we find.