This Too Shall Pass (Or Will It?)
How do you teach yourself to let go of holding on?
“This too shall pass.” That weary, hackneyed adage was what my wise-beyond-her-years but troubled best friend used to bolster me through the high school break-up. Considering that she was courting my ex-boyfriend behind my back at the time, I find it less appropriate in retrospect. But those are still the words I turn to when I have no ready-made answer to “what next?” or when the agony of unknowning becomes too much. This too shall pass.
All kinds of things pass: time. The seasons. The rain. Bowel obstructions. Some more painfully than others (see latter example). But teaching myself how to recognize that — how to honor the fact that sometimes things just… GO, has been harder than the passing. That first, devastating break-up was one in a multitude of lessons that all things in life — specifically, the things that are actually people—are outside of my control. It seems that, every year, there’s a new reminder of this.
High School Ex-boyfriend was the first — and the hardest — lesson. Like the GRE, it took two tries with him. A cumulative seven years of self-doubt and acceptance and love and heartbreak and all of the attendant inconveniences for me to understand he wasn’t meant to be in my life — not in that way, at least. Four years after the final goodbye I still intermittently, wistfully hope he finds his way back into the alchemist’s recipe that makes up this thing I am doing called Life. I also know that if he doesn’t, the alchemy won’t be affected. The magic will continue. He too, passed, and I am still okay.
More recently, another man reminded me how hard it is to let it pass, to let it go. To let him go. He was very nearly my friend, and we flitted in and out of each other’s lives on the coattails of whiskey-soaked nights, long, lingering conversations, and half a dozen hazy fuckings. I made him feel taken seriously, and he made me feel valuable because I took him seriously. We were colleagues. Work buddies. And then we weren’t. Because jobs, like all other things in life, sometimes pass.
I am a saver—some would say a pack rat, but my obsessive need to tidy keeps me from latching on to many objects or knick-knacks. Instead, I hold on to people. Friends from past lives and old places still take up room in my heart and in my phone book. Occasionally, I reach out, or we find ourselves together and reunited for a day in the same city. In the meantime I hold on to their memory and their worth through tokens, items, totems: band t-shirts, movie tickets, and photobooth triptychs. Even when I can’t keep the people, I keep what they meant to me. Those shared memories are collateral: See. Here I was, meaning something to you. There you were, in my life.
There was no such memento with this fellow. I had nothing when he left, aside from a few anecdotes, repeated enough that my more devoted audience could repeat them along with me. His absence left no gaps in my goings-on, but I still felt a hole. Like a blanket that’s worn in one spot. The blanket is whole, but you can still feel a draft.
That’s when I learned that the hardest job isn’t letting go of something — it’s letting go when there’s nothing — no one thing — to hold. In a small way, I understood why people still bury their dead: you need something, a place, a stone, a tree, to witness your mourning. To say, “See, there was a thing here, a person, a time that meant something. Here’s the evidence. See what remains.”
The best way to accept “this too shall pass” is within the statement itself: the action is no action at all, but a passivity. A standing by while it — whatever the monumental “it” is — happens. A dropping of arms and an acceptance that whatever’s passing does the moving. The hardest job is no job at all. It’s a meditation on disengagement. To echo Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” the losing isn’t hard to master, it’s the accepting of the disaster.
And you do. Accept. Or, at least I did. I filled up the hole: packed it tight with the warm, cotton love made of other good memories of people who held onto me as I held onto them. Sewed up the fraying edges with thread spun from the confidence I felt when new, welcome eyes roved over my figure.
But — and here’s the kicker — the hole is still always there. No matter how strongly patched. It’s just waiting for another fraying thread, another set of fingers to idly pick at it. This time, I was both prepared and unprepared to be undone. Just like any crooning ingenue will tell you, I knew Trouble the moment he walked into the room. Or rather, hopped onto the barstool next to me. I’ve learned that it’s not the moment I begin to look forward to seeing someone that signals the fraying , but the moment I begin to miss him. To realize that his absence causes an absence of something in me. I should prepare ahead of time. I should arm myself with Army-issued worsted wool (do they still worst wool?) and a knitting needle and an anti-heartbreak thimble.
It hurts too good.
Before the micro-analyzation, and the intentionally coincidental itineraries, and the drumming up of mutual friends for mutual events, I have prepared myself for that sweet ache. The “Oh, it isn’t but it could be” yearning that I let myself linger on for too long, like the worrying of a stubborn hangnail. Right thumb on right ring finger cuticle, I pick and play until it isn’t fun anymore. But how do I stop a force of habit?
It’s not a rhetorical question. I know there are healthy ways to combat any behavior, even the most habitual, even the bad ones (over-eating, smoking, drinking on work nights, TMZ) borne of initial pleasure. As any AA member will tell you, you have to want to quit, or else you’re getting nowhere. But even AA members have their tokens, their totems. Even addicts get pins and worrystones and emergency phone numbers. What we need is a hotline for people who Love Too Big. How do you train yourself to let go of that which has never happened; he whom you never had?
In time, I will learn to let my hands hang by my sides, and to let myself be still. I will stop picking, pulling, worrying, and fretting. I will learn to hold myself together, instead of trying to hold others too close. I will let them pass. I will let it all pass, and I too, will move on. Will move forward, pushed, passive, open, on the current of my own acceptance.
