Letting Go

I saw a posting the other day on the water-cooler of the Internet, Instagram, "Many people never get what they deserve because they're too busy holding on to what they should they let go." 

Based on an informal survey of the streets I walk on a regular basis, I'm assuming we must have a lot of truly deserving (if not needy) neighbors because the mountains of discarded household items are impressive (or would be if they came with their own Sherpas and base camps, which might be another attraction for Norwich, 'Adventures in Recycling,' admittedly not quite the level of appeal that the disc golf course that opened last week in Mohegan Park has, but every little bit helps unless it actually is litter, then not so much).   

The monthly street sweeps by the volunteers of Reliance Health and Saint Vincent de Paul Place supported by The Last Green Valley gather up tons of stuff at a time in targeted neighborhoods, while other outreaches,like WasteFree Connecticut, are more organic and individual in both scale and scope when it comes to helping put the bloom back into The Rose of New England. But clutter is everywhere.

The hardest place to reach in any cleaning, reorganization, or rightsizing I've found, is the space between my two ears. The late comedian and social observer, George Carlin, used to say the whole function of a house was someplace to keep all your 'stuff' and suggested we were each very partial to our own while holding other people's in far lower regard (he called it 'hits' but he put the S on the front). What he didn't say, and didn't need to, was that 'stuff' comes in all shapes, sizes, and varieties and is always in infinite supply

This time of year, especially because we empathize with fresh starts, each of us could do with a spring clean that's just as much focused on our mindset as it is on our basement. I've made the unhappy discovery (that's actually a lie; I knew it long ago but didn't want to admit it) that as I've aged I'm less agile and more fragile when it comes to trying new things, listening to new ideas, or starting on new projects. 

Many of us set out to change the world but would never consider starting with ourselves. We like change as a concept just not as a process; that whole holding on when we should be letting go thing tends to trip us up.It can be hard to adopt new ways of doing things when we've gotten comfortable with what we've always done. It's painful to realize that sometimes  the only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth (of the habit).

We don't really have the desire to think about what Norwich ten (or twenty or more) years from now could, or should, look like because we're too busy holding grudges about events that happened in the past which can no longer be changed. 

Many of us use the past as a reason to keep from embracing the present instead of as a fulcrum to move us into the future. Sometimes you have to let go to go forward.
-bill kenny