The Art of Letting Go at the dawn of a New Year
As part of the Hogmanay transition, one of the things I woke up thinking about was the usefulness of cleaving time into two, into the past and the future.
2023 becomes 2024. The dead year makes space for a new year, and we all do it, and in this particular winter period I've become very somatically aware of the amount of dead weight that I've been carrying, and it's providing me with a really powerful sense of what it means and feels like to finally let go of a number of grieving parts of me.
The new year gives me an opportunity to prune parts of me that have died a long time ago, and I'm able to do this because of the work I'm doing in psychoanalysis. And this is a very personal thing, but I think there's a universal experience which is worth sharing, which is this:
I'm starting to really value the process of mourning as a kind of paradoxical experience of needing to both really hold on to and bring close the feelings of grief over things that have happened to me (but might happen to anyone else about any number of things), and that closeness requires a real acceptance of what has happened, which can be very painful.
It's in that real acceptance and proximity and closeness that the paradoxical thing happens: very gently, when resting, the things that caused us grief and the source of our mourning can simply fall away like meat off a stewed bone. It simply drops while you weren’t looking.
And as I go through life, I start to feel like the leitmotif of ageing and growing older is the quiet, pleasantness of letting go of the things that caused me pain, only once I've truly seen them, held them, touched them, and accepted them.
So in this new year, it feels very potent to leave much behind that was mourned and that was stuck in grief and to breathe a sigh of relief and be in a little bit less pain. To breathe a sigh of relief and be a little bit less burdened, and to feel that living a full and complete life, is to experience future loss, to experience and go through mourning and to strive and seek to move through it at all, at all times and be willing to let things go when they need to be let go. We have much to mourn and much to grieve, but we must also use it to live.
It feels like a really useful reflection with which to renew oneself at the start of a new year.