This weekend I let my dog Lulu’s ashes go. We’ve been talking about it since we got her cremated. We were going to take her by the water where she first ventured in and realized she loved swimming. There were a couple of times where we even said today’s the day, ventured out and totally forgot about the ashes. We joked that she wasn’t ready to leave yet, but I think we were the ones who weren’t ready to let go. We could have forgotten, or found an excuse, but today we didn’t, and we finally let go of her ashes in the place where she first fell in love with water.
Letting go doesn’t have to be a bad thing. It means making room for something new. That doesn’t mean I’ll be getting a dog next week; it just means that something new is headed our way and we had to make room for it. It’s often easier said than done. When we moved almost two years ago, I had to let go of a lot of things. There were things I had put in storage and never looked at again. Some of those things were easy to get rid of, others not so much.
I have a bunch of boxes from the move that are sitting in the basement. It’s been almost 2 years and I haven’t had the need to look in those boxes for anything, so I guess I’ll be letting go of some more things shortly! It’s amazing how we give inanimate objects emotional meaning that makes it so challenging to let go. I have t-shirts that are practically falling apart that I’m still holding on to because they once belonged to my father. He passed away in 2004…
I still have a long way to go when it comes to practicing the art of letting go. In some situations, it’s a lot easier for me to let go and move on. Other times, like my dad’s t-shirts, it’s a little bit harder. My logical mind knows that there is nothing about my father that’s left in those t-shirts, the number of times they’ve been washed. It’s that sentimentality that can lead us to hoarding if we’re not careful! 😉
There are things we all need to let go of: habits that don’t serve us, limiting beliefs, relationships that don’t contribute anything positive in our lives, to name a few. It can be hard to let go, but we must. As I said earlier, letting go is the best way to invite new and better experiences into our lives.
The thought of letting go can be scary sometimes. When we get to the point of being ready and willing to let go and finally do it, we realize that it wasn’t as hard as we thought it would be. In a lot of cases, once we let go, we find that we’re able to move forwarded feeling much lighter.
What are you ready to let go of?