Letting it flow

I find it hard at this age and state in my life to let things flow. I constantly find myself wanting to grab on tight and hold onto things. Someone gave me a good visual, about how this part of my life should be like floating down a river, where you are constantly moving and you grab onto certain things and let them go and take some things with you as you go along, but you have to let yourself go and flow down the river before you can reach the lake, ocean, whatever big body of water lays ahead. Right now I feel like I am at the raging rapids and I’m trying to hold onto anything and everything for dear life. But what I think I need to understand is I won’t drown if I just let myself go, sometimes it is just better to let go of everything and let yourself be taken away with the current. Holding onto something and keeping myself stuck in the rapids will mean that I will never get out of them, where as if I just let go I can move past them and there are always calm waters after the waterfall. Such a good metaphor I think, it really resonates with me. It’s not an easy thing to do by any means but I know that it would feel better and it is worth the rough trip to get through those raging waters to the calm ones. It seems I have this inward fear that if I let things go they will completely disappear and so I constantly hold onto things and won’t let them go. But something someone said to me recently gave me a better perspective on that. She said, if you hold onto things too tightly you will strangle them, and if you let them go and they don’t come back they aren’t meant to be a part of you, and if you let them go and they do come back then they have resurfaced with a renewed freedom. Which to me means that those thoughts/feelings that come back will come back with a clearer perspective, recycled through the subconscious and now fresh and clean and in a much better place to handle. Sometimes the more you try to understand something the less it makes sense, but if you are able to let it go you have a better chance of understanding it better later. And I think that is something I just have to trust: that by letting go doesn’t mean I have given up, just that I am not in a place to fully understand yet and that place will come eventually. Patience. I am trying to learn Patience. Patience, Faith, Acceptance. Those are things that take continuous work and awareness. But when they are a part of my life I realize I am a much happier person, and that is what is important.