The Art of Letting Go

*This article first appeared on LinkedIn.

Why release is not weakness, and how it restored my strength, my clarity, and my life

For most of my early life, I carried an unfaltering belief that things would work out. Not because I was naïve, but because I had seen God come through again and again. Life was hard sometimes, but I wasn’t afraid of it. I enjoyed it. I trusted it.

That changed in my mid-20s.

My wife was diagnosed with cancer, and something in me tightened. Hope turned into vigilance. Faith turned into control. I researched every treatment, every option, every hospital, every possible way to defeat cancer in my strength. I held on to the belief if I made the right choices, she would survive. I didn’t realize it then, but I had stopped trusting and started gripping.

When she passed away, it didn’t stop. It just shifted.

I grabbed hold of my career. I grabbed hold of anything that felt like it could anchor me to something solid. I lived like everything could be taken from me at any moment, so I shrunk myself down to survive it.
I became small.
I didn’t know I had done it.
And I didn’t know how to undo it.

Fear can look like responsibility.
Control can look like strength.
But they actually drain the life out of you one small compromise at a time.

Eventually, I got tired; not exhausted, but fed up.
I got angry at the apathetic cycle I was living in.
I started to wonder, quietly, barely audibly:
What if things could be different?
What if letting go wasn’t the danger… but the way out?
What if the thing I was white-knuckling wasn’t saving me, but suffocating me?

Holding on hadn’t helped.
So I did the thing that terrified me:
I let go.

I let go of jockeying for position in the marketplace.
I let go of living like every good thing was temporary.
I let go and bought the motorcycle I’d always wanted; not because a motorcycle fixes anything, but because I needed to remember what freedom felt like in my own body.
I let go of the need to stay in my hometown, where every street corner reminded me of something I couldn’t get back.
I let go of trying to predict outcomes and started paying attention to the present moment; the one I actually had, the one God was still quietly holding open for me.

The strange thing is that when I loosened my grip, my strength returned.
Not all at once.
Not dramatically.
But slowly, steadily… like a long exhale after holding my breath.

Here’s what I learned:
Letting go isn’t quitting. Quitting is defeat. Letting go is power.
Quitting is falling apart because you believe you are powerless.
Letting go is laying something down because you’ve realized you are not.
The action looks the same, but the intention is completely different.
One shrinks you.
The other makes room for you to grow.

Letting go is not apathetic.
It’s accepting that we never have all the variables, and yet somehow things still work out.
It’s learning that life is lived forward.

I didn’t know it then, but the first step to letting go was curiosity. The curiosity that says:
What if life can still work out?
What if I could be happy again?

Curiosity is what brought me back to my body.
I bought weights. I trained.
Strength returned to my hands and clarity returned to my mind.
I kept promises to myself.
I found focus again.
I prayed honestly again.
I breathed again.
And, in a way, I lived again.

Letting go made room for me.

If you’re reading this and you feel scattered, or afraid, or small, I want you to know something:
You are not broken for feeling this way.
You are not weak for loosening your grip.
You are not a failure for stepping back from the things that kept you alive but no longer keep you whole.

Don’t quit, but let go.
Choose to trust that life is bigger than the thing you’re clinging to.
Step away from fear so you can step into strength.
This is the beginning of rebuilding.

And rebuilding always leads you somewhere better than where you began.