Letting Go

My parents were very different.

My father would rarely do a task for more than an hour.  A weekend at their vacation home usually started with him grabbing a bucket and a cloth to polish the west windows that would be covered in the sea salt the wind had brought in since last Sunday.  And the rest of the weekend would follow a similar path of many small useful tasks – from digging potatoes to chopping firewood – intercepted by pulling papers from his briefcase or walking around on the lawn dictating memos into a small recorder along with long walks in the forest with the rest of the family.

The upside of not digging/painting/sanding/sawing/chopping/reading/dictating for more than an hour was that he rarely had any overworked muscles and was generally available to his family.

My mother was the exact opposite.  When she started a task, it would get finished even if it cost her the next day in bed because she couldn’t move.

OK, I am slightly exaggerating here, but you get the whiff of where this is going.

On a recent Friendship Bench, we discussed letting go.

Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.

~David Foster Wallace

In the small group discussion, I shared the loss of two communities that had meant a lot to me for decades: a T-group I had founded with a friend 10 years ago and a book group I had been a member of for over 20 years.

The first I dissolved because changed life circumstances caused my co-host to be abroad so much that they stepped out of the group, and after organizing the space alone for a couple of years, I felt burned out.  I voiced to the group that I was having this concern, but nobody stepped up to help.

The book group also dissolved by several members having changed life circumstances, here caused by elderly parents’ needs.  What is the saying about “friends for a reason, a season, or a lifetime”?  Evidently, some book group members had a change of season.

After the break-out discussions, the Bench continued in plenum.  Somebody shared another stepping-down story from a realization that “clearly nobody else around is as passionate about this as you are.”  It is only now, writing, that I see the connection to my T-group; I feel validated by the mirror.

And then the Bench host had to step out early.  The co-host kept the lights on for another 10 minutes and I noticed that even with this subject – letting go – the group, me included, was hesitant to let go of our time together.  The irony of that – the host couldn’t have illustrated it better, had it been planned for that purpose.

The following day, Ipek Williamson wrote this LinkedIn post.  Ipek had joined for only the first 30 minutes of the meeting and the post itself was mainly an open invitation for others to join our Thursday community.  For whatever reason I felt a shift inside with respect to “truncated participation” when I read Ipek’s post.

I immediately started writing this piece, yet I didn’t really know what was beneath the feeling – writing it out helps the thinking process.  I think I used to carry a story in my head that if people didn’t show up for a whole event, it meant that they had something better to do.

I don’t think I have been in a situation very often where I have had such constraints. If that was the case, I would simply have said no to one of the conflicting events rather than only be there part-time.  But that also means that my experience with people showing up for only “the first or last inning” would be when I hosted.  As I was acculturated with Germanic punctuality and sit-down dinners, arriving during the main course or leaving before desserts – literally or figuratively – was not part of my inner blueprint.

Whatever the blueprint, the story I told myself about what the people arriving late or leaving early thought of my event was not pretty.  (Why do we do this to ourselves? Or is it just my conflicting blueprint? My personal insecurity?)

In the past, when I have organized regular gatherings for people loosely connected – like neighborhood teas or online events – I have purposefully put a fixed date and time into the calendar so people 1) could schedule it without needing to coordinate every meeting in person and 2) I could tell myself the story that if they didn’t show it was not personal but a scheduling conflict.

As an added benefit it would also tell other people regularly attending that the absence of some of their acquaintances was not personal to them but due to scheduling conflicts.  Who knows if this was ever on their mind or if it was just me transferring my own insecurities?

Something about Ipek joining this Bench, even if she had obligations pulling her away early, and then writing jubilantly about the gathering, composed a completely different story in my head:  the story of this event being so absolutely wonderful that she wouldn’t miss it for the world.  And she was truly bummed that she could only stay for 30 minutes.

What if I rewrite my inner story along those lines?  That people want to join my events so badly that they will come even if is super inconvenient for them.  They may even have to miss the “first or last inning” of another event.  That they are willingly giving up something to be there.

I am sure I will show up differently towards the people joining and probably make it considerably more likely that they will feel welcome when they do show up and bummed if they can’t be there next time.

And, naturally, I am wondering which M.O. I have picked up from my parents?  Girls often model after their mothers, but what if I have modeled the mindset after her but not the behavior?  Then transitions may be hard: consciously letting go of what I am doing now for something else will be unpleasant – like leaving the Zoom gathering on Thursday.  But if subconsciously I am more scattered and behave like my father, I heap loads of judgment on myself for not completing tasks.  Then I am “undisciplined”.

And I probably toss this c##p on unsuspecting people around me as well.  Inner subconscious tensions have a tendency to lead to that kind of behavior.

I can only echo Ipek’s warm recommendation of this regular Thursday gathering and am truly grateful for her writing it.  If not for discussions like these, when would I ever feel compelled to scratch the surface and question the stories I tell myself?

And to these self-defeating stories: Thank you for your service. You have taught me a lesson about the usefulness of regularly scheduled events.  But you may leave now; I am letting you go.