Let it go! How do I do that? How does he?
Let it go!
by Jonathan Sebastiao on Unsplash
“Let it go” were words I started saying to myself right after the election November 3. I said “let it go” again the days after January 6. And now that the second impeachment trial is over and done, I am once more encouraging myself to let it go.
It is not easy.
Facebook has become for me a less pleasant activity. Differences of opinion began to arise 5 years ago, have risen and fallen and risen again in the time since then. In the aftermath of yesterday’s vote by the Senate, my difference and disagreement with one person reached a peak.
Someone local, an associate rather than a close friend, and whom I’ve not seen in person during the pandemic, and I came close to name-calling on Facebook. Difference of opinion seems an understatement.
And it’s brought me to several questions. Questions I want to find my answers to.
How do I let it go?
How am I to release the judgement that has become harsher and harsher through all of this? As the political tension increased, I moved from the “he (everyone) has the right to his own opinion” to “how can he have that opinion?” to “what a stupid opinion!” How do I let that go?
I am working on it. That’s meant using all the stress release tactics I’ve learned in the last 5 decades. Now I am looking for more. I welcome your suggestions.
How does he let it go?
This is a question I cannot answer. Even if I could, it would be presumptuous of me to think I have the right answer. And it would not be my right or responsibility to share my answer with him. But I am curious as to how others of either side are working, discovering, succeeding at letting go of their stress regarding whichever is for them “the other side”. I am more than curious. I am sincerely interested in anyone’s answer to how they are going to let it go.
Is letting go a contest?
The partisanship began as a politically caused behavior. Through the last 5 years it moved beyond politics. It’s become a competition from our core. Right/wrong. Win/lose. Convict/acquit. I wonder if the competition will extend to, even taint, its own resolution.
Will we compete as to who lets it go fastest, most completely? Will we be proud that we hold on longest, refusing to let it go?
Can we move back to comfort? How?
Letting go is the essential first step. However, it may be the shortest step in the journey to move back to where we were and what we did despite our differences.
- Respect of the right to be different and so respect of the individual’s difference?
- Consideration of what those differences mean to them that we may understand?
- Appreciation of mutual effort to respect and consider, starting with our own effort?
- Courtesy for the sake of our working together to achieve something good for all?
Letting Go by Holding On
Creator of Peace, Reminder of Prayer,
you give us both the peace and the praying to let go
the tension of being different from one another,
the anguish of seeing the same evil as another’s fault,
the frustration of feeling all the other is wrong.
We are grateful for the opportunity
to breathe in our peace embraced and breathe out our comfort shared.
The pleasure of accepting that conflict can end and competition can
be put aside. Although we may have different ways
of getting to the common end–what is good for all and good
for each one of us–we are thankful now to know the joy
of successfully collaborating to reach that end.
And to know that end will really be another beginning
of another chance to know and bless
the harmony we now can know
by letting go of anything that makes it seem impossible.
And so it is. And so we let it go. Amen.
Love & blessings,
15 February 2021
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