LEARNING TO LET GO

A man shared his life-changing experience with me and while I have heard many such stories in my short existence upon this beautiful earth his was no less moving as if it were the first time anything had touched my heart. While his discovery represented an evolutionary hurtle I had conquered many years before it served as a refresher course on why I even bothered to wake up every morning. It reminded me of my daily goal to attempt a transformation of gobbledygook and utter chaos into something meaningful, structured and beautiful.

In retrospect it wasn’t so much what happened to him, the raw, undressed details that captured my attention and consequently my soul but rather the creative path he took to avert disaster and transform it into a quantifiable measure triumph!  What is more, the skills he used are the same ones we call upon daily performing the simplest deductive reasoning.  The point of disconnect for many men is acting decisively on what they already know.  What makes what he did different from many people is that he followed through solving the problem and successfully implemented its solution. 

Now I hear people complain all day long about “This and that!” and “That and this!” so I always say to them, “Wonderful!  You have identified the problem now don’t stop there, come up with a solution and then carry it out!”  It is my design to reach out to others, to push them and to introduce them to a more solutions-based outlook and strategy for handling life’s many problems.  To that end, my success is only as good as their desire to embrace openness. I learned many years ago that a person’s window must be first be open to positive change in order for them to catch its sweet breeze literally floating away from adversity. 

Well, after what I must assume had been many years of utopic but blindfolded bliss the gentleman realized everyone did not have his best interest at heart; a tough lesson for him at his age.  He learned that some people were willing to manipulate their association with him, pretending to be his ally, friend, lover and or confidant in order to carry out some craftily hidden agenda that would ultimately betray him.  Such people are willing to feign affection, hiding behind their wants and needs, rationalizing them to avoid a confrontation with the graveness of their deception.  A hunter can get closer to his prey by pretending at friendship, it psyches out his prey while he quietly executes the real purpose of the charade waiting to strike the fatal blow.  I will not say that my friend was gullible because he was not! However, it was my impression that he was certainly blinded by any of a number of variables ranging from amazing sex to the promise of amazing sex, romance, and the chic novelty of it all. Now, that is as far as any gentleman will go in the way of disclosing details that are more prudently left private.  In the final hour my gentleman friend was the hapless victim of betrayal, deceit, slander and a raging bonfire of vanities!  Having been there I applaud him for having the tenacity to rise from the ashes with both his dignity and manners intact!

How he managed his plight was most effective.  First he severed association with everyone who had been even remotely guilty of an indiscretion against him.  Secondly he re-established himself amongst those who had been steadfast friends and associates reaffirming their established bond.  Thirdly he retreated from the entire public reconstruction in order to reaffirm his relationship with himself in private.  He then gradually came out of sequester refreshed, and refocused.  He had analyzed and let go of the past, moved forward with a new plan of action and embraced the spirit of positive change; he was a new man!

Many of us go through similar exercises in which we must shed some of what we have come to associate as our “Selves” and then regroup to redefine self.  In many instances it is any man’s guess as to how long this “New Man” will last before it gradually degrades back to its former self?  But we must not preconceive fate!  The important lesson to be got from this example is the process. It could be argued that maintenance is also an integral element of process and I would be well inclined to agree because the simple process of learning through failure is one of the mightiest methods of human understanding.  What I took from this was an understanding of the concept, “terminus” or “terminal”!  A terminus or terminal is a place of finality the completion of a journey whether physical or aesthetic.  When traveling it is the point at which the vehicle comes to a final stop having arrived at its destination.  At this point the traveler must get out of the vehicle take whatever owns and earns he desires to preserve in order to begin a new phase of his journey, a new arrival.  At this point he can still leave anything, anything behind him, he can be free of the burdens of the past at least conceptually.  Whether he likes it or not the journey lay behind him at the terminus, it cannot be re-trod, it is final, before him lay a new journey and that is where his mind is bent, forward not backward.  No matter what he does he can only move forward from this point on as surely he could only ever have done; it is the way time works.  My hat goes off to this gentleman because he revived an old lesson in my mind, a rite of passage, an art appreciated by those who have truly lived and understood the meaning of what they have done, he had finally learned to let go.  My gentleman friend realized that the way men become better men is by gracefully learning to let go….

Written by D. Vollin