Letting Go or Giving Up

The difference is subtle – is it important?

Photo by diana on Unsplash

Sometimes.

After fighting, being active, doing what you could – you stop.

It feels wrong, like when you are driving your car fast on the motorway and then have to stop to fuel it – you want to continue, just around the next curve, just until the next gas station.

But you have to stop, because there’s no more fuel.

And when you are there, fueling the car, you realize that you need to fuel yourself too. At the gas station, there’s a café – you place yourself there, on a bench with a view over the place, and near a window, so that you can see people fuelling outside. You can see more than that: birds flying, there’s a sea nearby that you cannot see, but seagulls are flying in from there, looking for a lost piece of bread, or maybe the end of a hot-dog that fell out of someones hands.

You look at it all, your car freshly fuelled, yourself getting there, you tell yourself, because of that cup of coffee you have in front of you.

And then a few minutes pass, until you suddenly realize that you are tired. You have, somehow, reached the end of this part of your journey. You just want to sit there, with the rest of your coffee, watching the birds, the people, and maybe close your eyes for a moment, watching it all without seeing it.

“Sorry is that seat vacant?” – someone asks. You wake up, a bit confused but quickly realizing where you are. How long did you sleep? Just a second, maybe, or a minute – or longer?

You say “yes, I was about to leave”. “Thank you”, says the busy looking woman. You see that she has her family with her, probably just like you, stopping to fuel.

And off you go. In the car, and it feels wrong. You don’t want to go fast again, you want to sit – or go slowly.

Just like that situation.

Your mind has been in a high gear for a while, and now it isn’t, and you don’t want it to be that again.

Thoughout life, you do get back into gear, do speed up, heading for the next distance – not even a goal, because whenever you get anywhere, you will have to continue from there. You have lost track of where you were originally heading.

Dreaming about something, but what was it? There were some additional dreams too, that you do remember. Like sitting on the beach, looking at the ocean, relaxing. But the main goal of life?

You’ll probably be there, in that situation, several times during a lifetime. And each time you’ll somehow find back to the motorway, speeding up, forgetting about that relaxing beach, because there’s no time for it, you have other things to do. More important, you think, even though you don’t know why.

But one day, you can’t get up from that café bench when being asked. You’ll say “no, sorry, I’m still sitting here for a while to come”. And you know that you’ll never get back on the motorway.

You are letting go of the goal you don’t remember, to focus on the goal you do remember. The woman and her family, surely looking tired, can’t find rest in their minds to even smile to you, because you have found rest. They don’t understand, in that moment, that this is a breakthrough for you – a disruption of your life. You will never be the same again.

You have given up. You don’t care about the fluctuous goal anymore. You care about the beach. You can still see those seagulls, and you decide to find another road, not the motorway, not even the straight way, just another road, that eventually will bring you to the beach.

And you enjoy the ride, enjoy the breaks you take, not for refuelling, but for experiencing the places where you decide to have the breaks. You see a café, it looks nice, so you stop the car and go there to watch the people, and the view from there, and to feel life at a lower speed. Life that isn’t just a break for refuelling, but the real life, the permanent one, that you enjoy.

You don’t fall asleep now, you keep your eyes wide open to get the most of it.

Giving up, letting go of whatever goal you don’t remember what was, made you free. And you will find that beach, sooner or later, but now it doesn’t matter when it will be – even that dream is fading, because you like the journey to it as much as you imagine you would like the destination.

Now you enjoy every stop. You enjoy every move. And you enjoy every impression, every thought, and every sensory input you get. You even enjoy that coffee, that now isn’t about refuelling, but about the nice taste.