HERE'S TO HEALING IN NEW BEGINNINGS
Not a stage of your growth has been missed. Each exhale, each release, and each moment of letting go is a part of your growth journey. There will be times in life where “letting go” might feel like giving up. Letting go can feel like giving up for several reasons:
There’s the fear of the unknown. Embracing change and letting go of familiar situations is a place that feels uncomfortable and unsteady. And it only becomes more complicated when you are heavily invested in a certain outcome or have high expectations. In that space, the loss of a dream or the reality of what failed might become even more apparent.
In that space, it matters to know that it doesn’t make you weak for feeling the weight of “letting go.” Sometimes it may feel that way because, if you are grieving a loss or a big change, you might encounter other people who have never dealt with what you’re faced with, and they can’t understand why it’s been so hard for you. There might be people who make you feel that the best option is to hurry up and “look on the bright side” and simply think positively. Of course, it can be helpful to reframe your perspective on something but what has to be realized in this space is that it can take time to find that new frame.
Imagine you were painting a watercolor landscape on paper and right before you painted it, someone spilled coffee on it. At that moment, it’s only normal to be frustrated or upset about what happened. With some time, you might eventually find that the coffee stain can actually be turned into a mountain range. But now, it’s changed the landscape you were painting altogether. And now, you need a new frame. It’s going to take time to get used to what this landscape has become, because this is so different from what you’ve been spending all of your time on painting over the years. You might put it in that old frame you had and it just doesn’t work. Those coffee-stain mountains have completely changed it. But now, you’re ready to look for a way of reframing it. And if it takes time to find a new frame that works, that’s okay.
Perhaps, when it comes to letting go of bigger issues of life, we can allow ourselves the same grace we would allow for a coffee-stained watercolor painting. If we saw someone visibly upset, it would be easy to logically understand why they are upset. However, when it comes to the bigger losses and things we grieve in life, it can be harder to logically make sense of why someone might not want to immediately jump to the “bright side” of things.
Emotional processes are not bound by the same rules as logical reasoning. Just as it takes time to see the coffee stain as something beautiful, it takes time for our hearts and minds to integrate the experiences of loss and change into our lives.
And through it all, not a stage of your growth has been missed. Just because these experiences may not feel linear, it doesn’t mean that nothing is happening here. Instead, in that space in between letting go and deciding how you are going to move forward, you are learning to welcome grace. You are learning to pace yourself as heal and ease into this next part of your journey.
As you prepare to enter into a new month...
Here's to the courage in every release.
Here's to healing in new beginnings.
Here's to the grace of growth, finding you at every stage of this journey.
More in this week's series called "Embracing Mindful Rhythms", only with a subscription in the Storyteller App.
More tomorrow…
Sincerely,
Morgan Harper Nichols
@thestorytellerco
@morganharpernichols
