I feel like I’m finally settling in. 2023 was testing in that it was the year where I needed to learn to let go. I’m almost positive it isn’t the last time I will need to learn this lesson but before 2023 I didn’t think I was capable of letting go. I’m not a very patient person by nature so the whole theory that “time heals” just wasn’t convincing to me. However, after having multiple experiences of letting go of things rather important to me, I feel like I can say with confidence that time does in fact heal when it comes to letting go. At least, it heals if you allow it to.
I like to think of the things we let go of as a message in a bottle. When you’re done writing your message or out of a figurative sense and in a literal one, when you’re letting go of a person, a situation, or something important to you, you place that message in a bottle and take it to the beach. There, you set it on the shore and wait for the ocean tides to slowly pull it out into the vast sea where you will never see it again.
The message still exists, it has simply been let go of, no longer serving you. In a literal sense this would be you letting go of whatever it is, whoever it is, and just allowing it to float away until it is a distant memory, one that helped turn you into who you are today, but remains in the past because it belongs there.
Of course, you don’t need to allow that bottle to float out to sea, you can keep catching it and re-reading it, making edits, and trying to fix what you couldn’t before. This is fine to do, but if you don’t allow it to float away, it will never, and it will remain as long as you let it.
After I’ve willingly chosen to let go of something, there is almost always a period of sadness, of loss. Just like how our bottle remains on the shore for some time before it is fully carried out to sea, the loss of whatever we’ve let go of still exists and can motivate us to grab that bottle again.
But once the bottle is gone, that is all we remember it as. We are no longer attached to it. We don’t know where to find it, it’s gone. We can still appreciate what we had, but we are no longer bound to that thing. We’ve experienced the beauty of freedom.
