Hanging On By Your Last Thread? Let Go!

When you let go of that seemingly last hope, you sink into the realm of all possibility and open yourself to options...

 

We’ve all had those moments when it feels like you’re hanging on by one last fraying thread—to life, to sanity, to something else. One of those moments came for me a few weeks ago when most parts of my life—family, health, money, time—all took a dive at the same time. At first, I did what we instinctively do—held on as if my life depended on that last thread.
The result was a struggle on so many levels. There were the many emotional conflicts inherent in those fraying threads, plus, I was using all my energy to hold on to the status quo, even though it was the status quo was what was causing the problem. But you know that old adage that it’s better to dance with the devil you know than the devil you don’t.
Then, I tapped into my deeper wisdom and did the thing that I knew, intuitively, was the best ways to work with these fraying threads.
 

Let Go

You’ve heard the idea of going with the flow? Well holding on to your last fraying thread is going against the flow, not with it. When the rope is fraying, going with the flow means to let go of those last few threads. You can do this visually, by getting into a quiet state and imagine letting go of that last thread and see what happens. It may feel like you are free-falling for a time, which is a way of surrendering to your deeper forces and releasing the control of your limited and limiting mental programs.
When you let go of limitation in this way, you sink into the realm of all possibility and open yourself to options that you were not able to see when you were holding on to the familiar. The key is to keep letting go of the fear-based thoughts and emotions that come up; to keep breathing yourself to calmness by taking long slow deep inhales and slow, relaxed exhales; and to pay attention to the clues that life is giving you.
Life rarely brings you new opportunities through direct telegrams or an out-of-the-blue solution (though big direct things can happen). New opportunities also rarely arise by “thinking about it” because your thoughts arise from what you have already learned, and chances are if the answers lay in what you are already doing, you would be where you want to be and not where you are.
In the middle of all this for me, I remembered that what really calms me down is to edit fiction (not to write it, but to edit it.) So I opened a file that held a novel I had written years ago that I had wanted to change from third person (he said/she said) to first person (I said). But I never made the time to do it. In the midst of this feeling of being frayed, I followed the intuition to start editing. Not only did it calm me down and get me through the perceived crisis, but the book is now nearly ready to send out for representation and/or publication.

How Life Leads and Inspires You

Life generally inspires you to new areas, ideas, and opportunities in small, incrementally expansive hits, which are words, ideas, insights, etc. that spark something new in you. They may come in a conversation, something you read or hear, or through serendipity.
When I was looking for a place to get married years ago, three people in two days suggested Solvang, CA, even though none of them had been there. Did I get married in Solvang? No, but we drove there to check it out and got another “hit” from someone at the tourist office that there was a great little church in Ballard, about three miles outside of Solvang. That’s where we got married. But we never would have found that by using the tools that we knew about to find a place to get married (in the days before Google), which was to look through the local yellow pages.
Like the experience of getting sent to Solvang (which I had heard of) in order to get to Ballard (which I had never heard of and would likely have dismissed), life rarely gives you the completed picture. Instead, it gives you the next step and perhaps a hint to the step after that, and asks for your trust and your action in return. I got to Ballard by following the suggestion to investigate Solvang, and I “heard” that because I realized than when three people with no connection to each other all suggested the same thing, that life was trying to tell me something.

Follow the “Hits” Rather Than Assume an Outcome

Will the novel I edited to get through this rough patch get picked up by the first agent I send it to? Will it get sold for immediate publication for a fabulous advance? I have no idea. It would be great if it did, but I can really only get there by following the next “hit” in the process, patience-testing as that seems. It’s when you look too far ahead and assume a set meaning or an outcome based on a “hit” that you stop hearing the “hits” that take you forward.
Even if my novel languishes in the pre-publication abyss, I am so thankful for the “hit” to start editing it because it got me out of anxiety, into something that felt good and was productive and reminded me how much I loved to write fiction and work with story as a vehicle for transformation. Had I held on, dug in, refused to let go, I’d still be clinging to that thread.
By simply letting go and following the “hits” once I landed, I found myself in a whole new landscape, tapping into a joy that I had shelved years before along with my novel because it did not lead to the success that I had hoped for. What will happen next, I have no idea. But I do know that by letting go, my world opened up, and yours can to.
Try it the next time you’re hanging by a thread, and let me know what happens for you.