Brain Food #770: The act of letting go
"The first rehearsal for life is life itself"
Thoughts of the day
There are many obvious things in life we cannot control: the weather, the traffic in the morning, the health of our loved ones. These are all events and circumstances that exist beyond us, and perhaps there is no more obvious route to unhappiness than to convince ourselves we can affect them.
Similarly, when people claim they truly know what they want from the future, in some ways it is also an act that provides the illusion of control. The only way to know what to want from the future, the sum of events that have not yet occurred, is to be able to predict it. But the future is unpredictable, because it changes with every decision we make today, and with countless other decisions being made by others. The choices we make might narrow some paths, but they also expand others, creating new branches out of nowhere.
Perhaps the choices we make today should stop being about how they might affect the future. There can instead be right and wrong choices, not based on some non-descript, non-existent portion of time we have yet to meet, but based on our own values, principles, and the truth of who we are today, even if that may also change, sometimes more elusively than we would like.
As Stoic philosophers claim, we should only focus our energies on what we can control. The rest is an act of letting go.
From Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being:
“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come. […] There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, “sketch” is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.”
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