Make like a tree and leave
The fall equinox was last week, and I took no real care to notice the departure of summer. Well, I did, but like most things, I chose to ignore it. Like many, I have an aversion to the colder months—which is great considering the depth of the four seasons I receive where I live. I don’t know why I hate it so much.
I think the largest part is that I know I get especially sad in the darker months, lacking sun, greenspace, and the social willingness summer provides, I become isolated, cold, and miserable. I see it coming, but I never let the summer go until it’s too late.
This is something I’ve always known about myself—that I fail to let things go when they should. I tend to fall into a caretaker role, one I am working to fall out of with much dismay. It’s not uncommon that I will hold dead things thinking I can bring them back to life. It’s a problem that pervades most corners of my life and it provides some advantages and even more disadvantages.
For advantages, as I’ve mentioned, it makes me a caring person. This also means I resort to taking care of things, tending to tasks that aren’t necessarily mine to tend to, filling gaps in others, and making it my job to be the bridge between what something is and what I think it should be. I hope you hear the disadvantages there. There aren’t really any true advantages other than the rewards of people pleasing that deplete you eventually and give you no real sense of the trajectory of certain circumstances. Gripping so tightly has no perceivable impact on the level of care I provide to the things I love, so it might be the time to let go.
So summer, as it left, I held it so tightly that I can still feel it, though the temperature has dropped, the clouds have hardly parted, and the leaves are starting to blanket the ground outside. I can still feel it.
To the point of trajectory, my willingness to pretend the summer could last longer if I turned away was proven wrong, as expected, when the fall came anyways. Now I lost the summer, and the few moments we are granted to truly grieve it.
Transitions are hard, especially for us folks who are neurodivergent and struggle with smaller scale transitions like moving between tasks, or settings, or audiences. The whole environment is changing against our will, and it’ll continue to do that for our entire lives. Bummer.
A few years back I had realized I’m this type of person, the kind that fails to let things go. I viewed it as passion, and I viewed it as preference. I just hated the fall, and I really loved the summer. True. But when it started to become evident in other areas of my life there was no denying that I had a firm grip on most things in my life.
For a moment I considered that that I quickly became fixated on circumstances, goals, relationships, environments etc. and developed acute anxiety over the eventual loss of those things. I was incredibly aware how finite I felt most things were, and how easily I thought they could disappear if I wasn’t careful. My relationship to my life was anxiety ridden.
I remember actually Googling “How to Let Go?” because genuinely, what the fuck does that mean? You’ve probably heard this idea in a hundred different ultra-vague idioms. “Go with the Flow” being the most common. As expected, Google had nothing influential to say other than to recognize the degree of control you truly have.
If you’re like me, you’re probably thinking “what the fuck?” because without expansion that sentence is a little loaded and frankly, it’s a lot easier said than done.
I wanted to know the practical application of letting go, how can I let go of the things I simply can’t stop caring so deeply about? I wish someone told me it wasn’t about care, but I’ll get to that.
The fall is here, and the world won’t let me forget it. So, what is there to do? Like most things in our lives the answer is nothing. I can sit here and make a stink about the fleeting warmth of summer but I cannot misconstrue this resistance with grief—they’re simply not the same thing.
You see if you are someone. Period. If you are someone, you have probably struggled to differentiate between the forces in your life that are malleable, or subject to your influence and the forces that are beyond action. I know I have, and still do.
Seasons are an obvious one, and I think it’s a great metaphor for other untouchable influences that we wish we could change but simply can’t. I’m going to run with this one while I sift through what it means to let go.
First, lets be honest, letting go is another fun way of saying surrender. If you read that earlier essay, you probably have a general sense of what being devoid of desire is, or how it looks. For those that haven’t I’ll sum it up briefly. Letting go is two-fold, it is both the acceptance of the current circumstances and the abandonment of desire as resistance. This means that when we let go, we have a) acknowledged the factors and circumstances that surround us, and b) we acknowledge the actionable points.
This is all a fancy way to say that letting go is the antithesis of control, and humans are control freaks.
When the fall approaches, and the dread starts to form in my mind I can use my rational mind to say that the fall is an inevitability and that unless I suddenly adopt some crazy superpower, nothing within my arsenal is going to prevent it from arriving, or the summer from leaving. Easy to say. But a part of me will want to hold onto it tightly, and this part of me is both protective and maladaptive.
Just to be clear, the first step in any form of self-examination is non-judgemental observation. These are not judgements I hold against myself or my character, but rather, are experiences I have identified in a process of learning about myself, and pinpointing my suffering so that I can hold myself better. By that I mean that I can be a better friend to myself.
So, if you are sitting there and beating yourself up for your desire for control, it might be more helpful to step back and recognize that control is a human thing to want, and it is in some ways, in your best interest to want to change things for the better.
Back to letting go.
So when I made my Google search and it said first, to forgive yourself and others (fuck yeah compassion). The rest was pretty vague, citing things like accept your life, be intentional, blah blah blah.
Now this is all good advice but for the love of God could someone explain HOW? Well, don’t worry folks, that’s what I’m here for.
Nothing is a switch that happens overnight, though overtime there may be a moment of realization where you can detect changes in your thinking. This means it’s a practice and requires active engagement over time. The best part of this is that if you slip up, I can nearly guarantee the opportunity will arise again. As it does, you may think it’s happening less frequently, but the reality is that life tenders all sorts of opportunities for us to hate it’s guts, we simply become better equipped to working with it and ourselves.
So you’re being compassionate, now what? Well think of a part of your life that is causing discomfort. Let’s break it down. Is any of it it in your control? For reference, what we can control is entirely related to the self (which is badass if you think about the extensiveness of our free will). Our boundaries, our actions, goals, responses, self-talk, how we engage etc. are all up to us. They may be challenging but the point is these are points that are actionable.
What isn’t in your control? Bad news, it’s pretty much everything else. You can’t make people act, think, or feel differently than they do. You can’t force someone into a lifestyle that isn’t theirs, you can’t control the future, the past, the behaviours of the natural world or the intentions of others. The point here is that none of these things are worth considering within the dialogue of change.
Just for the sake of clarity, I’m not saying that these things should not be considered at all, but simply that our desire for these things to change is not an avenue that is worth exploring for prolonged periods of time. We may wish for the summer to last a little longer, but if I sit here and try to keep it around, I’m wasting a lot of energy. I’m also denying myself the feelings of grief that are real and lived, and the opportunity to enjoy the summer while it was here. Plus, fall is beautiful and is basically a milder summer. It would be a shame to fixate on what it’s not.
There are a lot of applications for this, and a lot of them can be visualized by the image of leaving. If you know me personally, you can probably skip ahead because I’ve probably spoken to you about this, but there’s a Zen Buddhist parable that I reflect on often. I’m not going to share the whole thing because there are a significant number of details that change from storyteller to storyteller, but here’s the gist:
There are two Buddhist monks, one older and one quite young. Both are walking and they approach a river where there is a woman who is worried about crossing. Knowing that touching a woman is a bit of a no-no for monks, the younger does not act. However, the older monk offers to carry the woman over the river, and she accepts. The younger is baffled by this abandonment of the principles they both accepted upon becoming monks and he gets a little miffed. The older leaves the woman on the opposite side of the river, she’s grateful for her safe travel across and they part ways. Hours pass and the younger of the two is tired of keeping his mouth shut about this and he confronts the older monk demanding to know how he could ever do such a thing. The older of the two simply states “I put her down hours ago, why are you still carrying her?”.
Now look, in hindsight he’s deflecting the question a bit, but the moral of the story is concrete. Why are you still carrying her? Is what you are carrying behind you? Is what you are holding onto a memory? Have things changed since then? Maybe it’s time to put it down.
This applies to any number of things, but simply put, letting go is the abandonment of desire as resistance. It’s leaving behind what you cannot change, it’s leaving the places, people, jobs, behaviours etc. behind.
For me right now these means I’ve been holding this weight of the summer, but the summer is no longer ‘real’ as in it is no longer present. Put it down.
Are you carrying the weight of the past—are you clinging to the way things used to be? I would recommend letting go of whatever is only carried for the sake of history. Emphasis on only. We do not owe the past anything, if circumstances have changed, there is no reason to keep old systems the same. This applies across the board.
For some, it’s future tense. Are you carrying the woman you haven’t met at the river yet? Are you gripping onto the worry of the winter? The eventual fear of the unknown. What a heavy thing the unknown is, it’s very nature is to hold all possibility—it’s no surprise that it hurts the way it does to carry.
This is all a way to say that the fall is a toughy. The world is, in a very real way, preparing for a shift into a quieter, more visually stagnant time. Seasonal depression is real and sucks, but I will sit with it more intimately when I admit that the colder months are here, and I will be okay. I won’t be excited to say goodbye to the summer, but like the woman at the river, I’ll leave it behind.