Let what go?
Is it supposed to be a remedy or some holy resolution to be able to “let it go,” as so many people are apt to advise a person suffering emotional distress? Are any and all of mankind’s deeply disturbing problems dismissible by following the advice of three words? Let it go.
Let what go?
The New Age Great Sunshine-Up-Your-Butt Machine Manual suggests it is simple to destroy great matters of anguish that take years to fester within our hearts. Just “let it go.” After all, “it’s all good.” It claims we are consciously grasping at the unsolved globs of anxiety and angst from –whatever— so, since we are responsible for maintaining the energy we have the power to—let it go.
If I ruled the universe with the powers of a deity I would organize an Ultimate Fighting event: Norman Vincent Peale versus Alan Watts. Perhaps a match to the death? What say you? Mister power-of-positive-thinking meets the Master-of-zen in a physical battle that packed each punch kick and poke with their individual philosophies. As would be spiritually sound, the winner would get nothing.
What about Dale Carnegie, you ask? Who would fight the man who proposed we learn how to win friends and influence people? Perhaps I would make Mr. Carnegie perform the eternal chore of King Sisyphus. I would make him push a heavy rock up a hill and just as he was about to reach the top, where he could rest the rock (let’s make it a boulder), it would back up and roll to the bottom of the hill. He would try, try, try again but he would never accomplish the task.
Christianity’s version of the king relieves him of the repetitive hell by insisting that God smashes the boulder “with the sledgehammer of His grace.” Well all right but God served the sentence in the first place. Mr. Carnegie learned his lesson and so should we because we heave and push our metaphoric boulders up a metaphoric hill but never far enough that it doesn’t slide down again? We’re doing those ourselves? It has nothing to do with physics? God must intervene? God becomes the “let-it-go switch”?
Let what go?
There is empirical importance why nothing should be let go. Not only isn’t it as simple as the Sunshine-Blowers want to make you believe but dismissing even the most dire element of your woes is personality surgery that does not do any good.
See, letting go is a state of mind and states of mind do not change the chemistry of emotions. You can only learn to assimilate and take what is valuable from your worst nightmarish problem if you admit to it, look it square in the eye and say, “Motherf****r, you are a part of me, so find out how you work in this cabbage patch of flesh and be useful.
Useful.
That’s right, nothing is pure, so negative feelings are not purely negative. The power of negativity has positive points and you don’t want to lose any positive points, you want to keep them, so if they are related to a negative mass then you need the negative mass housing the positive pieces.
Are you taking notes?
“You see,” said a woman I was dating, “I feel you say many negative things and you are happy to bring them up. I have had enough negative people around me and I don’t want any more.”
“So you only want me to sing happy songs and tell you how much I am invigorated by the warmth of the sun and the way the ions affect my outlook of humanity, which does not include a species like a mother-and-father team that imprisons and demeans their thirteen children by keeping them in the basement of a house and torturing them with a promise of crumbs to eat and rewarding them with one shower each a year, no less mention the name Elizabeth Smart? Is that it?”
“Sort of. I also want you to love my pets, because respect for all living things is a positive energy that wards off heavy emotions.”
“The kind that provokes a brown-recluse spider—Loxosceles reclusa—to bite and sometimes poison a person or an animal to death?”
“Sort of.”
“So you are sort of saying I should rid myself of negativity just like that and I will live a long and fruitful life with you and the rest of humanity?”
“Sort of. I mean, just let it go.”
“Why don’t you let it go f**k yourself? That, I think, would make humanity persist just fine.”
Let what go?
