Letting Go, Making Gains

The stacked attic shelves of the shared family cottage had a rich display from across the decades. Mason jars filled with bent nails, a vintage tin of poison ivy killer, a male urinal bedpan, a rusty Sears & Roebuck Craftsman circular saw, an aging ink-jet printer, mismatched curtain rods, and several dozen dusty books, to name just a few of the items. My father died 10 years ago after spending 85 summers in this house, and it finally dawned on me that since his passing, there was only one person standing in the way of truly cleaning the attic. And I could see that sentimentalist every time I looked in the mirror.

So when Sebastian brought up the idea of clearing the attic for the fifth time, I finally said, “OK, let’s do it” and then stood at the bottom of the stairs, receiving armloads of attic treasures in rapid-fire sequence. My son-in-law didn’t allow me back up the stairs until the shelves were stripped clean and he could come down to help me divide up the detritus in piles for recycling, the metal dump, the transfer station, and “to be trashed unless my brother or cousins want it.”?

The experience was unsettling and uplifting at the same time. It left me reflecting on the risks and rewards of taking action, especially the notion of ceding control. The risk is that something valuable might be lost forever. The reward is that letting go makes something new happen and creates an opening to the future.?

And so it is with making any big move.

When my mother-in-law moved closer to us for the last couple months of her life, she risked disorientation and a sense of loss but gained the warmth of daily contact with family members connecting with her in her final days.

When one of our daughters moved into her own apartment, she risked the added expense and challenge of living alone, but gained the chance to reinvent her approach to her business and how she leads her life.

When my wife argued for making a consecutive pair of six hour drives to see Geiranger fjord in Norway, we risked fatigue and joint pain, but opened the door to seeing an extraordinary part of the world that is beyond beautiful, transforming my understanding of this country and how the Ice Age left its lasting imprint.

My most recent move isn’t physical. It’s relational…shifting my approach to my work from doing nearly all of it myself to asking others to work with me. There are risks in delegating in terms of communications, matching expectations, meeting standards, managing cash flow, and layering on the complexity of my responsibility to others. But the benefits are multiple—not only financial but in terms of reducing stress, being a better partner to my clients, and creating output that is greater than I could do alone.?

Even greater benefits come from working collaboratively with other human beings—not only do we each contribute differing skills and perspectives, we also back each other up, both mechanically and empathetically.

Returning to my story of cleaning the attic, I’m struck by the value of giving up control to create an opening for the invention of what’s next and what’s new. In our 100-year-old cottage, the space Sebastian and I have created gives his generation a little more room to build its own relationship to the house as a container for its own summer memories rather than knowing it primarily as a museum of memories that I’ve held onto about me and my old man.??

Have a great month—and see what you can let go of to make it that much greater.