The Art Of Letting Go
There comes a moment in life when you learn to let go of certain dreams, friendships or boyfriends that at one point meant everything. Either way, we do it while still knowing that the important things are coming back to us, perhaps with different faces and more sincere smiles, and with fresh air that is able to help us begin again, again and again.
It’s interesting how the world of children’s literature gives us wonderful lessons about personal growth that would be worth thinking about more often. One of these examples is in “The Wizard of Oz” by Lyman Frank Baum. In this unforgettable literary work, we meet a young girl who is swept away by a powerful tornado and enters a new and unknown world.
From the moment Dorothy enters the world of Oz, she thinks of only one thing: returning home. Her initial fear of this new and frightening situation gradually subsides thanks to her new and strange friends, her silver shoes and a very concrete goal: to find the Wizard of Oz and ask him to send her home. To achieve this, all she needs to do is follow the yellow path.
After many experiences and accidents, the young protagonist discovers that in reality the power to return home was always there, inside her. Yet her fascinating journey is the key to awakening her personal strengths one by one and to discovering the incomparable courage that we all have a small part of in ourselves.
Getting lost and far away from our usual path is not as bad as it may seem at first. Letting go of certain things, people, projects and ambitions is not the end of the world. Ultimately, the steps we take and everything we learn are important. Only in this way can we let what must come back come back to us as we continue along this yellow path of personal growth – or the “Golden Way” that Buddhism speaks of.
What must return to us comes back to its own time and place. In the meantime, we are practicing letting go.
Andrea is an engineer. She has created a sophisticated and original means of transport for pets that adapts to the car’s rear seats and guarantees total safety and comfort for pets. Every time she presents the project to a business person, she explains that her idea would save the lives of countless animals that die in traffic accidents due to lack of protection.
So far, only one person is interested in Andrea’s idea, but after the initial “yes”, the company has withdrawn and said that it is not a viable project. Still, our main character has not quit. She does not give up and she has not let any of her dreams fall apart. Andrea understands that she must continue to work. She has told herself that she may need to look for cheaper but equally safe materials, or search for other markets, present her idea abroad, etc…
She knows that opportunities come back, but they come back to their own time and place. She is absolutely certain that more people and organizations will be attracted to her project, and therefore she continues to invest her time, ideas and efforts in the project every single day. The most likely scenario is that this young engineer will succeed sooner or later because, as the philosopher Jose Antonio Marina tells us, talent intelligence is in action. Even though we sometimes think that everything is lost, the yellow road is always there, in front of us.
Losing, getting a negative answer, making a mistake, stumbling three times over the same pebble, or even falling in love with the least suitable person in the world, all have their purpose: to learn a lesson. All these holes in the road mean improving the strength of our purpose in life because after the “storm” comes the silence and the need to weave personal goals that are more beautiful, more dignified, strong and above all resistant.
Sooner or later the opportunities will return, and when they do, we will be perfectly prepared.
After letting go, everything that comes back comes in a different way.
The stars are so far from us that the light of even the closest takes years to reach our little planet. Sometimes we forget it, and there are nights we look forward to pointing at them, one by one, forgetting that many of them no longer exist, that they exploded a long time ago, and collapsed into star dust in the cosmic vacuum.
We know that not everything that comes back to us is real, like the light from the stars. Sometimes we lose love and we wait for a better, brighter, more passionate and romantic love. Other times we let an opportunity escape, and we wait for the same happiness to appear as soon as possible, in an instant. But none of this will happen as fast as we hope or in the way we dream of.
We need to be patient and remember that things will definitely come back, but always in a different way. Maybe love comes again, but it is more calm and enriching. Or another opportunity comes that is not so conspicuous and shiny, but it offers several benefits.
It’s about being receptive and wearing the same silver shoes that Dorothy wears in The Wizard of Oz. Although the films would make us believe that the shoes were red, the book’s author, Lyman Frank Baum, imagined silver shoes for a very specific reason.
Dorothy’s shoes represented the “silver thread” of spiritual growth. This is the link where we get a clearer view of things and our own identity to achieve wisdom. To understand that life is a journey where things are lost and won, where nothing is permanent and where everything that comes our way is a gift we must know how to get the most out of.
