Open Hands

As my youngest pulled away in the grey chill of the morning, decked out in his college hoodie and mad bomber hat, I caught my reflection in the storm door window. A shadow of my own mom was evident, watching me drive away from her. 

But she’s been gone for sixteen years now, and my days of wearing a college sweatshirt are thirty years in the past. All these numbers confound me. Time is elusive. 

My oldest recently left our home to start his new and exciting life, moving into his first apartment and beginning his career. He has known no other “home” than this one, and now it will be the home he returns to, the home he visits. The room he dreamt in for twenty-three years will still be in the same spot, but it will be a memory. A place he will only be able to return to in dreams.

My husband and I have been married twenty-six years – nearly half of our lives, but simultaneously the blink of an eye. Together we have had four dogs, witnessing them grow and leave us. Time.

And such is life. Life is transitory; its very nature is Change. To grasp, to try to hold on, is to suffer. Pema Chodron says, “To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.” 

The past two years, if nothing else, have taught me this, the lesson yogic sages have been teaching for thousands of years: clinging creates suffering. Holding on to expectations, wants, emotions, and people is a waste of precious energy. We must practice being with what is. And practice and practice and practice.

“Constantly thinking on the objects of the senses, one develops attachment to them; and from attachment arises the desire to possess them; and desires give rise to anger (when desires are unfulfilled).” ~Bhagavad Gita: Chapter 2, verse 62

The past two years of a global pandemic and political and social upheaval have been ripe with lessons and opportunities to practice letting go. Add to that the prospect of the empty nest, and I’m a full-time student. I can approach all this change with fists raised, fighting all the way, clinging to my youth, or my children, or the way things could have been had this pandemic not ravaged our world in so many ways. 

Or I can be present with what is, and practice breathing love and compassion and grace into my being, training my mind like an athlete trains her body. I can “let go” and recognize that these thoughts of what could have been, what I wish were to be, are not “me,” but are just clouds passing through the sky of my mind. I don’t need to identify with them. And by letting go of all that energy needed to try to “possess,” as the Gita teaches, I create space for more constructive, positive, grace-filled thoughts and actions. 

It’s not easy. It’s not fast. But it’s so freeing. Instead of tightening your grip, remember that opening your hands creates space to receive new and unexpected gifts – gifts that can change you and our world, one passing cloud at a time.