Let Go
I spent most of this weekend unapologetically binge-watching The Beast in Me on Netflix. There's a really great scene in the middle of it where Nile and Aggie get drunk and Aggie talks about why she bought her beautiful house. "I just went all in on the future," she tells him. "I thought it was the end of all that running. I thought it was forever." And Nile replies, "What's the old joke? You wanna make God laugh, tell him your plans."
It's a line that feels very close to the bone given the last few years, but it's also a philosophical idea that keeps cropping up in different ways — thankfully, continually reminding me that actually not going all in on the future, not having control of things, is how you find peace.
I've been reading Light by Eva Figes this week, which I found slightly slow and not particularly gripping, but it was interesting to me how Monet learned to meet the world through the shifting, ungraspable nature of light. Monet’s true devotion at Giverny was to the light that played across the lilies. He would return again and again, at all hours of the day, accepting that each moment was entirely new and unrepeatable. Light shows that he wasn’t trying to impose control; he was practising witness. Surrender. Presence.
At the Tate, you can find Monet's The Seine at Port-Villez (1894), in which Monet has stripped away the anchors, the edges and the definable forms and instead, has painted the shimmering, momentary envelope of light around the river. It feels like a surrender. The painting feels free — all elements of control purely distilled into light.
Rosalía expressed something similar in a recent interview. She spoke about wanting to make herself available to what life throws at her and to live in uncertainty without trying to protect herself. “It’s about freedom and letting go,” she said.
I think I would have found the notion of this all completely impossible in the first eight years of being a mother. Looking back, I see my lizard brain leading me, trying at all costs to make sure my babies were ok, sacrificing my own freedom and peace completely in an attempt to achieve the impossible.
And perhaps because I couldn't quite grasp that that was not the way to live, the universe sent a sharp and frightening lesson: my sweet son being hospitalised a couple of years ago with an auto-immune disease that made every single joint in his body swell and bruise. I crawled into his hospital bed one day — he couldn't walk or sit up, his spine and knee caps being too swollen and bruised to bear weight. We were exhausted, managing steroids and urine tests checking for possible kidney failure, and I simply let go. I couldn't control what was happening. I couldn't fix it. All we could do was follow the doctors' instructions and...hope.
And in the face of that terrifying truth, something softened. The only thing left was presence. Surrender. Love. And with surrender came an unexpected freedom. A loosening. A sense of stepping into one of Monet’s paintings, where boundaries blur, where everything is movement and reflection, where you’re held within something larger and more luminous than fear.
In When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chödrön writes that “to be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.” That to live fully is “to be always in no-man’s land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh.” She adds, “To live is to be willing to die over and over again.”
So as we approach the close of the Year of the Snake — a year revolving around shedding skins, releasing what no longer serves, moving through fear, and letting lies and illusions fall away — there’s no better time to stop planning as a way of protecting ourselves, to stop fearing as a way of pretending we’re in control, and to stop staying stuck simply because we’re afraid of the unknown.
Olivia x
BTS
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