This injury has felt like my first heartbreak. When I ended my first long-term relationship, the emotional pain was intense—I didn’t know how to traverse the overwhelming feelings of sadness and loss. I  didn’t have guidebook or a step-by-step process to follow to handle my grief. I felt like I was on my own, and things would never be the same again. Of course, the pain subsided over time, but by trying to force myself to feel different and hold on to the old—what was— and not accepting what is only caused me more pain.

I had to learn to let go.

Loss does something that causes us tremendous pain. It’s only naturally to resist change, but we are no longer in that period of time, and clinging just makes it worse. As Sogyal Rinpoche in The Tibetan Book of the Living and Dying writes:

Grasping is the source of all our problems. We are terrified of letting go, terrified, in fact, of living at all, since learning to live is learning to let go. And this is the tragedy and irony of our struggle to hold on: not only is it impossible, but it brings us the very pain we are seeking to avoid.

Letting go has been the theme of my year.

I finally closed down a business that I started back in university that wasn’t working and caused me a lot of stress over the years. Let it go.

I finished a 100,000 page manuscript draft in March of this year, but the dots were not connecting after brute force, so I shelved it, and decided that I would revisit later. Accept that it’s not working just yet.

I planned three races this year, two of which have already been cancelled and the third, likely to be deferred also because I’ve been sidelined from a series of injuries. I had to end my almost 7-year run streak for the same reason. It is what it is.

I held on to all these things for far too long, resisting change, and wishing things were different—hoping with a bit more force and control, things would change more favourably in my direction. My inability to let go caused me more pain and suffering that I would have endured if I stopped forcing everything all the time. I’ve learned after many hard lessons, that forcing things that aren’t working may help in the short-term, but rarely does it work out for me in the long term. 

Wishing thing were different from what they are causes so much more suffering than accepting what is, learning from the experience, and adapting. With each of the losses I’ve endured this year, something new and wonderful arose: a new business, a new creative opportunity, new hobbies, a new outlook on life that’s made me a happier, more flexible person.

Loss hurts, but the more we cling and resist, the less we can see new opportunities forming, sometimes even better than what we had before. Letting go, as Rinpoche so eloquently put, is indeed a necessary first step in truly living.