On Losing Control

I wrote the pages in The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur over a year ago and they are ringing so hauntingly relevant right now I thought I would share today’s entry in full.

Thoughts?

March 22
ON LETTING GO

I was but too conscious of a vagrant fiber in myself, which too often thrilled me in my solitary walks with the temptation to wander on into infinite space, and by a single spasm of resolution to emancipate myself from the drudgery of prosaic serfdom to respectability and the regular course of things. This prompting has been at times my familiar demon, and I could not but feel a kind of respectful sympathy for those who had dared what I had only sketched out to myself as a splendid possibility.
James Russell Lowell – On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners (1871)

What does letting go mean to you?

To achieve any form of freedom sometimes, we have to let go of our attachment to an ideal and trust that we’re not in complete control of everything. That’s not the same as giving up – it’s an acceptance of the fact that something grander perhaps is waiting for us.

Everyone is weighed down by an attachment to one thing or another and it’s these things, these attachments, that keep us from getting what we want most.

It’s not easy to identify what’s holding us back but it might be the drudgery of prosaic serfdom to respectability – or something like that.

Challenge Question: What are you gripping tightly to right now?