Tag: Let it go

It’s spring time-Use your noggin!

Engaging your brain in new tasks is a key to boosting brain performance, or at least that is what the website of “Brain World Magazine” says. I will summarize the webpage here to get to my point: Most fabulous inventions happened when someone asked themselves- Is it possible and how can I do it? When you ask the hard questions, you expand your brain. This makes sense for it forces you to think and problem solve. As healthy humans, we WANT to discover-to search for new. This process keeps our brains active and functioning. “True creativity comes from an integrated brain that establishes new, robust connections between the parts of your brain dealing with cognition, emotion, vital functions, and crosstalk between the two hemispheres of your brain.”  ( http://brainworldmagazine.com/ask-brain-spring-creativity-within/)  My thoughts today are about creativity.

Think about a snake, a crab, a caterpillar. They all shed one skin and start anew. If we don’t keep trying to rejuvenate ourselves, we too can get stuck in our old skin. It’s SPRING, the season of renew-Go For It! The transformations we create and abide by change with the times and what is going on within ourselves. It is this pursuit of transformations, this metamorphosis, that forms the very base of the process of LETTING GO!  I believe this shedding is the core of what I will call creative imagination. My imagination most often happens when I just “DO”, when I don’t worry too much about what I may be creating.  I might not know “the hard question” and that’s ok. My brain is stretched by the creative process regardless of a conscious question. The process relaxes me and lets the questions flow. Right now I am working on an array of new projects. That alone is maxing out part of my mind. Creativity churns and keeps my imagination going full steam. (Or would it be imagination churns and keeps the creativity going?) It’s hard to dial my brain down and do things like sleep sometimes.  One project is my third children’s book which is indeed about imagination. I am struggling with a cover design. Resisting the usual exploding of things from a cloud, or a head, is difficult. Colors are about the only thing I have come up with. I might resort to the ‘norm.” After all, it is tried and true- but, it doesn’t feel very creative or imaginative.

So far I have a line drawing of a book open and exploding colors.
I like the “look,” but it does it say – “Hey this story is about the main character, our friend Fuddles, who has lost his imagination and then it’s found! Ideas?

Possible book 3 cover
Possible book 3 cover

reality/illusions…truths/facts/fiction and mysteries of life.

Let it go - Let it beDrawings, photos, artwork and imagery, words, politics, fake news, real news, family matters, eclipses – it’s all part of an ever changing bombastic world which feels pretty out of balance these days. This unevenness-this unbalance-has brought me back continually to the thoughts of a few articles I have recently read and enjoyed. The basic premise is-“Let it be” and/or “Just be”….

And so that’s the topic of this post.

“We need to learn how to let go because trying to hold onto anything is like trying to nail jello to a wall: Nothing sticks, nothing stays. When David Chadwick asked Suzuki Roshi** to express the heart of Buddhism in just a few words, Roshi replied “Everything changes.” … We can’t hold onto a world that’s constantly changing and transforming—we can’t make the world stop being the world….”

To hold on is to cling, to ask questions (which is just often just another mode of clinging- masked as searching) as we look for the answers is NOT an act of “let it be”… the goal is to be INDEPENDENT, not DEPENDENT in our worlds, our loves, and our lives. If we are independent, we can let ourselves, and the ones we love “just be” whom ever they are. A young child craves and clings to their parent, but as they grow they gain independence and they return with love and joy (hopefully.) “Affection, love, care, and concern are the very essence of enlightened life.”  Those words can be for pretty much anything we encounter in our modern world. We cling all too often to what we suppose it all to be, what we hope it all to be…maybe it’s our jobs, our goals, our families, our expectations, our friendships, our relationships, our possessions-you get the idea….If we “let it go” and step back a bit, accept it as comes our way, breath in and breath deep, we allow ourselves and others to “just be”-to accept it/them as it/they are. After all, in reality, much of the time we can’t really do much to change it. If we can learn to flow with it, even if it has pain and suffering, and try not to fight it, then maybe, if we are lucky, we can learn to “just be” with it. To let it unfold. To let life takes its natural course. By the way, this doesn’t mean we give up, or that we lose all control, or that we stop making our best efforts to improve ourselves and our circumstances-it just means we understand that sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. Failure is only not to keep trying.

“To let something be requires much more strength than just letting go, because we’re learning to sit with the ambiguity that life often creates from those moments that we could never have conceived of…..

It’s a choice to let a situation remain unresolved, let the loose ends dangle, and allow the options to remain. Letting it be means giving up deadlines, timelines, and ultimatums—because life doesn’t figure itself out when we want it to, but rather when it’s meant to.

And until that moment happens, we can laugh, smile, grow, and experience life, all the while knowing that we didn’t let go of something that wasn’t meant to be let go of. We simply made the choice to sit with the situation as is, without trying to control the outcome.

Time may not heal all wounds, but it does have a way of clearing even the murkiest of waters—if we just let it be.”

Ideas and quotes draw from the articles of: https://www.elephantjournal.com/2011/07/letting-go-what-it-means-how-to-do-it/

and

https://www.elephantjournal.com/2017/07/fck-letting-it-go-instead-just-let-it-be/

** David Chadwick (born 1945) grew up in Texas and moved to California to study Zen as a student of Shunryu Suzuki in 1966. Chadwick was ordained as a Buddhist priest in 1971, shortly before Suzuki’s death. He assisted in the operation of the San Francisco Zen Center for a number of years. Chadwick has two children and has married and remarried. He has written several books and continues to “dabble in Buddhism and related matters”.

 

SaveSave

SaveSave

SaveSave

SaveSave

SaveSave

SaveSave

SaveSave