Guiding Light: Let it go! Let everything go!

Life is full of incidents, pleasant and unpleasant. When an unpleasant thing happens, we are apt to lose our balance: this creates a negative emotion which expresses itself in a feeling of sadness, or depression. An effective way of dealing with such a situation is to go to the root of the matter and 'let go' of what is causing the negative emotion. Let it go! Let everything go!

Has my sister failed to understand me? Let it go! Has my brother spoken ill of me? Let it go! Has my best friend turned against me? Let it go! Have I suffered loss in business? Let it go!

There was a gardener who loved each tree, each plant, each little shrub in his garden so dearly that he would not cast away the dead leaves and the withered branches. He stored them all in his garden. Gradually all the space in his small garden was taken up by the dead leaves and dry branches, and the beautiful garden wore the appearance of a garbage heap.

Are we not, so many of us, like this gardener? We go on storing worries and anxieties, failures and frustrations, fears and disappointments, which are better cast away and forgotten. And the beautiful garden of our life turns into a wasteland!

A troubled conscience will never allow us to live in peace and quiet - and our conscience will continue to remain troubled unless we rid ourselves of the hatred and resentment that make us unforgiving, the joy-killers that disturb our calm.

The past is over and done with. It is gone with the wind! Therefore, I say to you, release it once and for all! Let it go!

If we wish to achieve inner peace, there is only one way - release ourselves from anger and resentment, learn to let it go.

Remind yourself that anger hurts you more than the person who upset you, and visualise it melting away as an act of kindness to yourself.

In this transitory world— a world in which things come and go, nothing abides— is there anything worth worrying over?

Let it go! You can't start the next chapter of your life if you keep re-reading the last one. The more we let go, the more we conserve our energies for the constructive and creative tasks of life.

Dada J P Vaswani is a humanitarian, philosopher, educator, acclaimed writer, powerful orator, messiah of ahimsa, and non-sectarian spiritual leader

Published on: Tuesday, March 14, 2023, 06:00 AM IST