“Hanging On” or “Letting Go”

How many times have we felt hanging on is all we can do? For many years I felt I was hanging on to a cliff with one hand, the other one waving for help. Letting go was not an option (I thought at the time) and hanging on for dear life, hoping no one would step on my fingers was all I could do. Alligators were standing below, so I thought, laughing with their big mouths, swinging their huge, powerful tails, waiting…waiting for the fall. Really, this was how I imagined that period of my life of hanging on. Terrors of what would happen if I “let go” were powerful and exerted so much influence on my mind that I could not think clearly and act with reason. Laughing was hard to do and many times I also felt just like the woman in the picture, trapped in a very tight space with no options to move one way the other.

Today when asked how I am doing, I still say, “just hanging on” but don’t really feel the anxiety of those days. Laughter comes more easily and so does thinking. My mind is not so “squeezed” so words come more freely. These words are many times in the form of prayers and trusting in “letting go” is easier to do.

Now I have to wonder when to “hold on” and when to “let go” … hanging on takes as much courage as letting go…
We must hang on to our faith, to our God, to our love for family, friends and country. We have to be prepared to let go of our children when they grow up, so they can grow up. We have to let go of past prejudices and of any harm done to us, deliberately or unintentionally. Well, I made the wrong choices many times and the falls were not too severe nor the hanging on too calamitous. I like to think that the wrong choices helped me make right ones and the experiences caused by those wrong choices were meaningful lessons.

Eleanor Roosevelt said, “We all create the person we become by our choices as we go through life. In a real sense, by the time we are adults, we are the sum total of the choices we have made.”