The muscle of letting go.

Letting go of your thoughts can become a lot of fun, and a great relief. Often I’ll find myself suddenly getting wrapped up in a thought–maybe something stressful, maybe something obsessive, just something that I can feel eating up all my mental computing power–and then it occurs to me, like the clouds parting to reveal the sun, that I can just stop. I don’t have to hold onto those thoughts.

And suddenly they are gone. They hold no power. And I feel like I can breathe again.

It’s like using a muscle that I’m not used to having. Imagine spending your whole life locked in a room, just wandering around, until you realize that the one rectangular part on the wall is actually what’s called a “door,” and you can just open it and walk out anytime you want. Suddenly a whole new part of the world is revealed to you! But sometimes as you’re wandering around you find yourself stuck in a room again, and it takes you a while to remember that you can open the door.

That sense of relief you would feel suddenly remembering what you already learned about opening doors would hit you like a wave. That’s how it feels when I remember that I can let my thoughts go.

The goal, of course, is to someday never get stuck in any rooms–but that’s not realistic. The human mind is always finding itself stuck, that’s just its nature. But it’s also within the nature of the mind to find the doors and let itself out. Eventually, after you do it enough, you recognize the doors more and more quickly, and you spend less and less time stuck in rooms.

Naturally there are some thoughts that are easier to let go of than others. Thoughts that are laced heavily with emotion are the hardest, no matter if they’re happy thoughts or sad ones or angry ones. (I personally find particularly difficult are the thoughts laced with a certain mix of hurt and anger. If I feel like I’ve been unfairly rebuffed or I’m being ignored, it’s very hard for me to really get my mind to move on.)

What are some of the thoughts and emotions that you have a harder time letting go of? What are the easiest ones?

Meditation #39: Let go of your thoughts before sleep.

At night, when it’s time for sleep, don’t be afraid to let go of your thoughts in order to drift away.

Sometimes I literally say goodnight to the different thoughts and mental projects that have followed me to bed. I often visualize a shelf in my mind on which I place each thing, one by one, as I say goodnight. I can rest easy knowing that each thing will still be there to greet me in the morning. It’s not like you are going to forget that you wanted to research online schools, or study Chinese, or figure out how to crack that plot point in your new novel.

Those thoughts came to you once, and they will come to you again. By putting them to bed at night, you aren’t saying goodbye to them forever.

And if you are worried, like I often used to be, that if you don’t think about a certain thing right now then you might miss out on some tremendous insight into it–well, let that notion go. Odds are, given the overwhelming similarities between your brain today and your brain tomorrow, you will still have that insight whether you think about the thing now or later. And, as I said once before, it’s always prudent to go with the odds.

Let things go as easily as you pick them up.

I know I don’t have any control over the whims that come to me, the ones that urge me to take an interest in this or that; to pick up a new book, to start watching a new series, to work on a new project, etc. Sometimes I will follow those whims, sometimes I will ignore them. It depends on how strong it is.

Recently I had the urge to read Silver Surfer comics, which I haven’t done for years. The urge was really strong, so I felt compelled to follow it. But it meant abandoning* some of my current things, primarily reading a book I had just started a few days earlier. It wasn’t an easy choice in that regard, because I felt guilty about quitting the book. But the urge to dive into the mythos of the Silver Surfer (a character that I adore more than most other characters) was so strong that it seemed impossible to ignore it. The amount of pleasure I would get from reading about Surfer’s adventures would almost assuredly be greater than whatever pleasure I was getting from the book I was reading–even though it was a good book!

But then I realized: My anxiety was coming not from being unable to fight the new urge, but from being unable to let go of the previous urge as easily as it came to me. One day, I was not reading that book. Then I discovered that it existed, and I was in the mood to read just such a book, so I started reading it. Not much thought went into it. Certainly no anxiety. It seemed like a “no-brainer,” as they say.

And yet when I suddenly found myself with another seeming “no-brainer” (reading my favorite comic book character), suddenly I was wracked with guilt over it.

Instead, what I needed to do was let my old urge go as easily as it came. Let it blow away like a leaf on the wind, or like a butterfly who came to rest on my hand and then took off again on its own volition.

If you often suffer from the same kind of guilt I do about jumping from one thing to another, I hope you can do the same with your urges as I’ve learned to do with mine.

Let things go as easily as you pick them up, and you will find your mind is a lot more at ease.

*Abandoning is a strong word that I find myself using a lot when it comes to things like this, and I want to try to stop thinking of it like that. I used the word here to highlight how strongly I felt about putting down the one book to make room for the other, but in reality it’s not “abandoning” anything. No matter what you are doing, you are someday going to stop doing it: Reading, painting a picture, building a church, breathing… Whether you stop when the task is complete, or when external causes force you to stop (be it lack of interest, personal reasons, death…) you will, regardless, not be doing it forever. So don’t think of it as abandoning. The thing, after all, doesn’t need you, as the word “abandon” implies. It’s only a thing, or an action. Not a child or an animal or a plant.

Anyway, I’m rambling.