The Art Of Letting Go

There is an almost comical, eerily consistent, and awe-inspiring phenomenon that has played out in my life this past year. Perhaps it has gone on for even longer, stretching back into my childhood, and I’ve only been too blind to see it.

Before explaining, I have to stress how forgetful I can be at times. Many days I forget what I had to eat for breakfast that morning (as the cliche goes), or forget where my phone is, the same one that’s in my hand. So it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise to learn how often I misplace things, even valuable things such as my headphones. But perhaps this forgetfulness has also served to teach me a valuable lesson...

It begins with the story of the lost headphones. I was working at a gym as a personal fitness trainer in the summer of 2019. Nearly every day on my 2 hour break I would find my favourite playlist, put on my Beats headphones, and do my workout as music blasted in my ears. Having always been a lover of music, listening to music while working out not only motivated me, but it also put me in my own little world where I could focus and work on myself and my own goals. Sometimes I would even find myself doing cardio or lifting weights while listening to meditation music.

I also was in the habit of listening to music on the way to work, and once I got in I would change in the washroom. One day I made the fateful mistake of leaving my headphones on the counter in the lady’s change room. Completely forgetting to take them with me, I went on with my work day. It wasn’t until the next day that I realized they were missing, and as expected, I felt several different emotions. I felt guilty and idiotic for misplacing such an expensive possession. I felt the expected frantic desperation to find them again, however no one had seen them and they weren’t in the lost and found.

Then another mentality found it’s way into my mind. Having been reading Eckart Tolle’s book A New Earth at the time, I was reminded of the ideal of letting go - letting go of the stories we tell ourselves, and of our ego’s attachment to things that do not need to define us. I decided in that moment to let go completely of my attachment to my lost possession. It didn’t define me. I was no less myself with or without the headphones. I decided that what was meant for me would be for me, and perhaps the person who had found it or even stolen it, needed it more than I did. The headphone’s time in my life was done. Time to move on.

This act of letting go gave me a huge sense of contentment, acceptance, and peace. Of course I periodically still kicked myself for loosing the headphones, but eventually, I pretty much forgot about them, and was getting used to using my corded earbuds instead.

Then something amazing happened. My manager came up to me one day during my break with a pair of black beats headphones in his hands. “I believe these are yours,” he said. My eyes went wide. It had been nearly a month since I’d lost them.

“But I checked several times in lost and found and there never was anything,” I questioned.

“Well I just found them in lost and found today,” he replied. Turning them on I checked in my phone’s Bluetooth connections to make sure, and low and behold they indeed were labeled as my long lost headphones. It was then that I realized that only until the moment when I’d truly let them go with no intention of having them in my possession ever again, was when they came back to me.

I began to recognize this pattern in my life off and on with small things, but just less than a month ago was when it happened again in such a clear and undeniable way that I had to accept that this is simply just the way the Universe works.

I had been going through a rough patch in one of my close relationships at the time. One day I decided to take my bike out and go for a day trip to the edge of Calgary, giving myself space and time to process and think things through. I stopped in Bowness Park and walked my bike off the main road onto a beaten path through the bushes. This part of the city has quickly become one of my favourites. Although it is still aways away from the mountain ranges I love so dearly, here I can sense Mother Earth’s call more clearly amongst the tall trees, the rich forest floor, and the greenery that rustles in the wind.

Once there, since it was around mid-day, I parked my bike against a nearby tree, hiked up to a spot overlooking the meadow, and took out my packed lunch for a much needed energy boost. This was the moment that I took out my Bluetooth ear buds, and set them down beside me. Ya, not such a great idea.

15 minutes later I got up, feeling rested and ready to bike back home. By the time I got back on the path, I realized I was missing something very important - my music! A pang of pure annoyance with my talent for misplacing things began to cloud over my good mood. I spent the next 10 minutes retracing my steps, which hadn’t been many, however I knew it was like searching for a needle in a haystack as my eyes combed through the detailed landscape of the forest floor. It was to no avail.

That was when the soft whisper of wisdom once again entered my mind, “Just let go.” Quite indeed, the idea of simply letting all your cares and worries about something you do in-fact care very much about, wash away, can be relieving. However, in practice, it tends to seem counterintuitive and it feels a lot like giving up control.

Isn’t that funny and a little ironic? I had done everything I could to find my missing earbuds to no avail, so really, it was out of my control wether I wanted it to be or not. The one thing I could control was my response to the situation and what I decided to do about it. So I listened to that familiar whisper of wisdom, and decided to just let it go.

Three whole days later, I arrived back at the same spot in Bowness Park, happy to once again be amongst the trees in my own little Wonderland. Climbing up to the same spot I had had my lunch last time, I was looking forward to a few minutes of meditation, the missing earbuds far from my mind. However, as you may be expecting by now, low and behold my eyes fell upon the lost earbuds, laying there in the dirt, plain as day.

About a week later, the rough patch in that close relationship of mine smoothed over, and while this may seem completely unrelated, I have a feeling it isn’t. See, once I was reminded of the need to let go, to stop chasing things instead of letting what’s meant for me simply be for me, I decided the only option I had left was to apply this principle to the situation I found myself in. Once I decided to let go and my mentality began to shift from clinging to accepting, something almost magical happened. The storm abated, the waters calmed, the sun came out. It was almost as if the storm had largely been a result of my own desperation.

And so, that concludes the story of how I discovered a principle I still need to be reminded of over and over again, something I plan to spend the next while attempting to take into practice, something I like to call, the art of letting go.