About a year ago I was at a New Ideas conference (I think) where a friend of mine, David Vitale, was giving a talk about the whiskey they make called Starward. David was on stage telling their origin story. The crowd was being handed glasses of whiskey and I found myself chatting with a young man who was presenting next. We both stood at the back of the room.
I forget the man’s name, but he created a meditation app, the name of which also eludes me.
We were talking about the act of letting go, and what happened next is something I think about often. “Do you mind if I tell you a story?” he asked.
Before he began, he took a pencil from his pocket, and placed it inside my hand. “Make a fist”, he said.
When something bad happens to us, he began, or we’re humiliated, offended, or even just upset, we hold onto this emotion much like the pencil in your hand. We close our fist around it, holding it tight, because it’s all we can think about — it consumes us. The worse the suffering, the tighter we grip it.
After a while, it begins to hurt and if we hold onto it for too long, that pencil will leave a mark and even scar the hand.
So what do we do?
It is easy to think the right thing to do is drop the pencil, toss the thoughts aside and never think about it again.
But we can’t.
It’s impossible to stop thinking of things, especially painful memories. As emotional creatures, we often turn small infractions into capital crimes. To think we can cast aside these thoughts is adorable, but naive.
Instead, the man told me, open up your palm. I looked down, and there the pencil was - still there, but the struggle was gone.
You can carry the pencil in your palm without it harming you, but you have to let it go.
I have come to realise that negative emotions will always be there, but we don’t have to let them take over and get in the drivers seat. When my wife and I talk about this story (It comes up often) it’s a great reminder that even the most painful thoughts don’t need to impact us as much as we often allow them to.
I like the idea that when bad things happen, there’s room to decide how tightly we grip our fist. Viktor Frankl, author of ‘Man’s Search for meaning’ said,
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
When bad things happen to me now, I think of that pencil and ask, do I really want to grip onto this? In most cases the answer is no, and I often find myself turning over my hand, and opening up my palm as a commitment to deciding just how much I want this to impact my life moving forward.
The story has given me a prompt to which I think about all painful interactions. I’ve discovered that I am capable of both holding onto something painful, and letting it go at the same time.
