Repost: Let Go of The Monkey Bars

NOTE #1 : 

 This excerpt comes from a book the Book Fairy gave me (thank you!), Life is a Verb, by Patti Digh:

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Let Go of the Monkey Bars

"When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be."
--Lao Tzu 

 Sometimes taking flight takes letting go.

Letting go takes faith.

Faith takes letting go.

It all requires wings.

And so it goes.

As Kierkegaard said, "Without risk there is no faith, and the greater the risk, the greater the faith." Flying begins with a leap of faith.

At the end of each year, I ask myself two questions: What do I want to create in this New Year and, perhaps even more importantly, what do I want to let go?

This year, I needed to let go of a project I had been holding on to, one that was lucrative but deflected my attention from my real work. I needed to really let go, not pretend to let go, or hold on to vestiges of it to keep me comfortable.

It was a letting go that sent me flying into that space between the monkey bars, where you've let go but haven't reached the other bar yet, the letting go that has to happen before the next bar is in your hand.

Just after my leap, a friend told me I reminded her of a trapeze artist, flinging myself out into the universe. That moment of release before catching the new bar is called transition. Perhaps it is the only place that real change happens. As humanitarian Danaan Parry said, "I have noticed that, in our culture, this transition is looked upon as a 'no-thing,' a no-place between places. I have a sneaking suspicion that the transition zone is the only real thing, and the bars are just illusions we dream up to avoid where the real chang, the real growth occurs for us."

I am enamored of liminal spaces, those spaces in between. I spend my days thinking about them, exploring them, talking to people who are living in them. Airplanes create odd liminal spaces, and so does any transition from life to death, from here to there.

Remember monkey bars? The hot feeling in your palm, that squared-off place where your fingers meet your fleshy palm, the heat generated by the holding on? It was hard for me to navigate the monkey bars as a child, I dreaded letting go. I would hold on until any momentum my body had was gone, until I was a deadweight hung straight down from the bar, its metal becoming hotter in my palm. And then I would have to drop, off the bars, not go forward or back, palms smelling metallic the rest of the day remind me. Marilyn Ferguson wrote: "It's not so much that we fear . . . it's like being between trapezes. It's Linus when his blanket is in the dryer. There's nothing to hold on to."

There's nothing to hold on to.

Sometimes letting go is shedding, like a snake sheds its skin in times of growth. Young snakes, it turns out, shed more frequently than older ones. Healthy snakes shed their skin in one piece. Before snakes shed, they have a period of relative inactivity--are they getting ready? Their underlying new skin is soft and vulnerable to damage.

And so it is with humans.

That moment when there is nothing to hang on to is the moment when we are most present, most alive, most vulnerable, most human.