The One Thing My Mom Taught Me About Letting Go

 

My mom is not a deeply profound person.

At her core, she is thoughtful and playfully silly. She's not the person you necessarily go to expecting some life-changing philosophical wisdom.

And yet, every once in a while, she says something that sticks with me.

When I was younger, I was upset about something. I have absolutely no idea what it was now, which tells me it probably wasn't quite the earth-shattering crisis I thought it was at the time.

I was having a fit about it, and my mom said:

"Hate takes up so much energy. It takes less energy to forgive them and go on with your life."

I don't remember what I was mad about.

I remember that.

And the older I get, the more I realize she wasn't really just talking about hate.

She was talking about negativity in general.

About the things we replay in our heads. The arguments we have years after the other person has completely forgotten them. The things people said that we continue to give power to long after they've stopped mattering in our actual lives.

I've carried that thought with me for years.

Not perfectly, obviously.

I still catch myself holding onto things that probably don't deserve a permanent place on my radar. Sometimes I'll realize I'm irritated about something that happened three days ago and think, Why am I still giving this free rent?

Because we're human.

Even my mom, the woman who gave me this little piece of wisdom, isn't immune to holding onto things. She can hold a grudge. She can get irritated. She can revisit something that probably should have been left in the past.

And I think that's part of what makes the lesson more meaningful to me.

It wasn't advice from someone who had somehow mastered being above negativity.

It was advice from another imperfect human being who understood that sometimes you have to consciously decide what deserves your energy.

Letting Go Doesn't Mean Pretending It Didn't Happen

Forgiveness doesn't necessarily mean pretending someone didn't hurt you. It doesn't mean letting someone back into your life. It doesn't mean there aren't consequences.

Sometimes forgiveness is simply deciding that you're done carrying it.

And sometimes "going on with your life" means setting a boundary, walking away, and refusing to spend another Tuesday afternoon mentally arguing with someone who isn't even in the room.

It can also mean accepting that you can't change how a situation unfolded. Forgiving yourself for something you said years ago. Or realizing that being right about something doesn't mean you have to keep revisiting it until you've exhausted every possible argument in your head.

And sometimes, letting go takes longer than we'd like it to.

You don't always wake up one morning and suddenly feel at peace about something that hurt you. Sometimes you have to make that decision over and over again, every time the memory resurfaces or you find yourself replaying the conversation.

That doesn't mean you're failing at forgiveness.

It means you're human.

The goal isn't to never feel angry again. It's to stop letting something that happened in the past dictate how much peace you get to have in the present.

I still have work to do on this.

There are absolutely things I need to get better at letting go of.

I'm not walking around with a permanent state of inner peace, gracefully releasing every negative thought into the universe. Sometimes I can recognize that something isn't worth my energy and still spend an unreasonable amount of time being annoyed about it.

Knowing better and actually doing better are two different things.

But I think there's something valuable in learning to recognize when we're doing it. When we're giving our time and attention to something that isn't changing, isn't helping, and probably isn't even affecting the other person anymore.

Sometimes we have to remind ourselves that we don't have to keep picking up something we've already put down.

And then there are the other situations.

You know the ones.

If someone has spent years being an objectively terrible person and life eventually hands them a little consequence with a nice big bow on top...

Well.

I may smile.

I can't help my face.

I'm not saying it's my finest quality. I'm just saying I'm still a work in progress.

Apparently, forgiveness takes less energy than hate.

But sometimes karma doesn't even require you to lift a finger, and I'm only human.