Letting Go

I’ve been losing things lately.  I lost track of my address book for a number of days, finding it in neither the usual place it holds at the bottom of my bag, nor its interim home of my work inbox or, as I like to call it, my travelling office.  After using it on Monday and needing it on Wednesday I spread the word that it was missing and was more than happy to discover by Thursday night someone had seen in on a shelf and safely returned it to me.  How it got there I don’t know.  I also don’t know how it is that I managed to lose track of it.

I’ve been thinking about the future.  One step in that process is meeting with someone here who’s trained as a coach to give me some coaching sessions.  The only problem is that I’ve misplaced the opening questionnaire she’d emailed me.  I had folded it and put it in my bag, attempting to defer the anxious response that arose within me to the difficult questions such as “what am I passionate about?” “what do I like doing?” “what do I dislike doing?”.  See?   Difficult questions.  Or something like that. 

On the one hand it’s a new experience for me to be so seemingly absentminded, particularly with important items such as my address book.  As a side note, I think I just might get some sort of electronic device when I leave next month which will hold this sort of information in a digital format.  Sure, I’ve lived in the woods for three years but I’m not so out of it that I don’t know the world of technological devices has exploded in an exponential burst of innovation and I plan on utilizing it to my full advantage.  Fears of brain cancer be gone, I want to check my email at random hot spots! 

Perhaps, though, it’s not as much of an aside as I presume.  The world is changing; we’re bombarded by endless bits of information.  Though it seems I lead a simple life in the woods I sometimes feel like the very opposite is true, that in some ways I’m even more susceptible to the ever-changing ways of the collective consciousness around the globe through the yogic way of willingly inviting continual change into my life.  With all these thought-streams passing around my mind it’s no wonder I’m forgetting things.

I’m preparing to leave the ashram.  There’s a four-month calendar in my office.  As December became a memory to be wiped away and April, the month of my departure, first appeared on it, I felt a bit of anxiety.  Wait a minute, May means something new, something different, something I have to create on my own.  Eeep!  It became this deadline of ending, this sense of impending doom that was looming off in the future.  The past few weeks I’ve been focusing on just what it is that I want to create for myself.  I’ve decided to transition to Nelson, get a job and stay for a couple of months or so.  I feel very good about this temporary transitionary plan.  It gives me a nice balance of structure and freedom as I found my ground in that world out there.  Goodness knows picking what to have for supper will be enough freedom of choice after basically three years of professional chefs making my meals for me every single day.  The sense of impending doom is gone.  Replacing it is this knowledge of continuity as my awareness expands to see the broader scope of my life.

As I gear up for this change there might be things in my awareness that I simply have to let slide.  Another aspect of this forgetting is the fact that these years of expanding self awareness have simply given me a little more freedom to be easy on myself.  I no longer need to meticulously hold myself to impossible standards such as knowing exactly where my address book is at all times.  There’s a freedom in my days I haven’t been in touch with before, a sort of allowance of humanness as a gift I can now give myself.  I’m not a robot, sometimes I forget things.  I don’t need to know where this impossible sense of perfection comes from.  It’s enough to know that I don’t need to carry it until my knuckles are white with striving anymore.

Lord Buddha says the cause of suffering in this world is attachment.  What can I let go of in order to live more freely?  I can release notions of myself as step up to be who I actually am.  Letting go of images I discover a reality I can actively create in every moment.  And that feels pretty good indeed.