The Act of Letting Go
Nine years ago, on my last night living in our first year student residence, my friends and I watched Spirited Away. It was my first time watching it, and it left me with a feeling of magic as I drifted back to my room at 3AM that night. I remember looking back at my friends halfway through the movie, and feeling a rush of fondness for them. It was one of those rare instances when you recognize that a moment is special while you are still living in it. I wrote about this the next morning in my diary dated April 30, 2015.
Now, nine years later and we are still watching Miyazaki movies together. Tonight, we watched Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. It is a an old movie, before Studio Ghibli was even Studio Ghibli. It was about a young girl, a princess, fighting to protect her village in a post apocalyptic world. There is something very pure in the messages that children’s movies try to convey, lessons that seem unremarkable when you watch as a child, but seem particular poignant and relevant when you are an adult. Be kind to others, help those in need, don’t give up, everything will be okay in the end. These are core lessons we have learned as children, but as adults, we tend to forget — as reality is far more complicated and leaves us disillusioned from the morals that we once knew to be true.
This is inevitable, it is a natural part of growing up — realizing that nothing is guaranteed to be true. Not every ending is happily ever after, not every good deed is met with reward. There was a scene in which the princess is taken away as hostage, and a group of small children come to her crying, scared that she will not come back. She promises to them that she will. This seems to appease them and they are happy again. I remembered briefly as a child how the same trick would work on me. My parents would reassure me with a pinky promise. There was even an accompanying Chinese rhyme, which ended with the line “no take backs for 100 years”. I thrived off pinky promises, it gave me a sense of security. When 911 happened, I remember seeing the smoky towers flash over and over again on every TV channel. When I asked my parents what happened, they told me it was bad guys. For a few months that fall, I developed a fear of “bad guys”, I would have nightmares of bad guys coming into our home to kidnap me, such that my dad would carry me up to our door before bed so that I could personally lock the door chain. They pinky promised me everything was going to be ok, and so I was temporarily appeased.
What is the purpose of promises, if not for our need for a sense of security? Even as adults, we crave certainty, predictability, the lack thereof resulting in what we call anxiety. But as adults, the pinky promise illusion no longer works. We are quick to realize that no amount of uncertainty can be pinky promised away. This is inherently scary. And so what to we do? We are no longer than children waiting for the princess to come back. Instead, we become her, and we need to be brave and continue to operate in spite of the uncertainty — with the faith everything will turn out okay in the end, that the lessons we learned as children still do hold some truth, even if it might not look exactly like what we had imagined. Still life goes on, still we continue living.
Easier said than done.
These last few days have been tumultuous for me, with no shortage of uncertainty. I have been trying to tell myself to let go, to let go, to let go. I have been reading books, listening to podcasts, to try and didactically teach myself to let go. But no amount of drilling has been able to enforce this in my brain. Tonight, I finally realized that you can only learn to let go by actively letting go. To let go is a verb, and it is made easier with action. Like laughing with old friends, watching comforting movies, listening to music, dancing. I need to actively engage in beautiful things again. For beauty exists for no productive purpose, but to remind us that we are beings capable of experiencing useless beautiful things. And thus we feel wonderfully human again, refreshingly alive, and what a blessing that is. And thus we can choose to hold onto this, and in that moment, whatever uncertainty remains will quietly let itself go.
Lots of love,
Cindy