December 5 – Let Go. What (or whom) did you let go of this year? Why? (Author: Alice Bradley)

This one is easy to touch, because it was so much of my year, but it’s only easy to touch in the same way an elephant would be if standing in your kitchen. Easy to touch, too big to encompass. Every time it moves, something else is shaken up.

Ever read the book (or see the movie) About a Boy by Nick Hornby? Little dorky Marcus lives with his idealistic single mom, and their vulnerability, her fear, scares him. Marcus is earnest, embarrassingly visible, and a little weird. He says, about reaching out for a friend:

“Suddenly I realized – two people isn’t enough. You need backup. If you’re only two people, and someone drops off the edge, then you’re on your own. Two isn’t a large enough number. You need three at least.”  

I identified crashingly hard with Marcus when I first read that book – from his vulnerability to his humiliating honesty – and it only got worse when I watched the pale little actor with the Spock eyebrows in the movie. Marcus’s happy ending is Christmas dinner with an oddball collection of exes and friends. They only find each other with liberal amounts of trying hard and extending benefit of the doubt.  In my simplest and most childlike of emotional spaces, that was my vision of security. And “try-hard, benefit-of-doubt” was my known path to getting there.

I saw this prompt last night, and have been writing about it ever since. As I said, it’s been the centre of my year. But it’s too big and unwieldy to communicate in a blog post; too many tendrils extended in too many directions. The writing has been good. I’ve been pulling patterns together.

Suffice it to say that I’m helping my internal Marcus loosen his death grip on the idea of safety through continuity and generous communication.

Instead, I am trying to learn the wisdom that life, at its most wonderful, is change.