A few days ago, I was watching Chester carrying a stick along the beach at Mount Maunganui. It was a good stick. The sort of stick a Labrador would happily carry for miles and even fight his sister for.
He trotted along proudly with it for a while. Then something else caught his attention. It could have been a wave, a shell, a smell, or even another dog coming along the beach. The stick dropped onto the sand and he wandered off without giving it a second thought.
I laughed. Not because of the stick, but because we humans would have turned it into a whole life story. We would have wondered whether we were making the right decision, overthinking the whole thing with thoughts like whether we should have kept it, whether we would regret leaving it behind, or whether we would ever find another stick as good as that one. Or whatever else the mind cooked up to keep hold of it.
Why Is It So Hard to Move On?
Dogs simply move on with life. Freely and easily. As if they intrinsically know that they are looked after by life.
We tend to hold onto things. Maybe that’s because nobody ever really teaches us how to let go. We’re taught how to achieve, how to accumulate, how to improve, how to hold things together, and how to build a life – grow up, get married, have children, retire, die. But very few of us are taught what to do when life begins taking things away.
And sooner or later, life asks this of every single one of us. A relationship ends. Children grow up and leave home. Our bodies change as we go through menopause and midlife. A career chapter closes. A dream doesn’t happen. A beloved animal takes their final breath. Someone we love dies.
Life keeps moving, and we’re left standing there with our hands wrapped tightly around something that no longer exists in the form we knew it. Fists clenched and in agony.
Understanding the Pain of Resistance
Much of human suffering comes from this simple misunderstanding. We think the pain comes from what happened, but often, a large part of the pain comes from our resistance to what happened. Not because we’re doing anything wrong or because we should somehow be better at coping, but simply because nobody taught us how.
Nobody taught us that grief and love can exist together. Nobody taught us that sadness doesn’t need to be fixed, it simply needs to be felt. Nobody taught us that life is constantly changing shape and that the only constant is change itself. Nobody taught us how to soften our grip, to release the resistance and find peace inside ourselves.
So we fight. We replay conversations in our head. We search for answers that we can never find. We wonder what we could have done differently. We try to hold on to a version of life that has already moved on. It’s utterly exhausting, like trying to stop the tide with your hands, or holding onto a handful of sand with a tightly held fist.
Learning How to Let Go of the Past Every Day
The strange thing is that letting go isn’t something we do once. It’s not a single decision, it is a lifelong invitation.
Every day offers small opportunities. Let go of being right. Let go of needing the perfect answer. Let go of replaying yesterday. Let go of worrying about next Tuesday. Let go of the argument that finished three hours ago. Let go of the version of yourself you think you should still be.
You can give yourself and everyone else that compassion. And then life becomes surprisingly light when we’re not carrying so much.
This doesn’t mean becoming passive or not caring. It doesn’t mean pretending loss doesn’t hurt. In many ways, it is the opposite. When we stop fighting life, we can finally meet it. We can feel grief fully. Love fully. Laugh fully. Cry fully. We stop living in resistance to what’s here and begin actually taking part in what’s here.
Finding Peace in a Changing World
Perhaps that is why dogs seem so free. They don’t spend much time arguing with reality. The ball is gone, the ball is here. It’s raining, now it’s sunny. This stick, now that stick. This moment, now this one. They move with life.
The older I get, the more deeply it seems that life keeps teaching the same lesson simply in different forms. Everything changes, everything moves, everything arrives, and everything leaves. And you are here, through all of it.
And when you think about it, all these little everyday losses are really just practice runs for the big one. The final letting go we all face is death itself. It feels that the more we practice loosening our grip on the small things now, the easier and more peaceful that final transition will be when our own time comes. And that’s exactly what I noticed in my work with the elder community. The people who were the most relaxed and at ease in life, also had the most easy transition into death when the time came.
Loosening Your Grip on Life
When you’re right in the thick of dealing with grief or just trying to figure out how to let go of the past, it feels impossible. But maybe it’s simpler than we think. Maybe it’s just about loosening our grip enough to let the moment happen, without overthinking it or believing every worried thought our mind throws at us. Letting go of the mind enough to simply be here. Happily, completely and with a heart full of joy.
I looked back down the beach, but Chester was already way ahead of me, chasing a seagull. The good stick was long gone, buried somewhere in the sand behind us. And he did not care one bit.