I Still Do Not Know If I Let It Go

I have been running this experiment for a while now and I want to tell you about the part that has not worked out, because the part that worked is easy to write and slightly suspicious on its own.

The experiment is small. Somebody cuts me off, I give them room and a few seconds, and I do not make it mean anything about them. That is it. And on the road it works, reliably, in a way almost nothing else I have tried works. I arrive places differently. There is a specific kind of tightness across the chest that used to be waiting for me at the office and mostly is not any more. If you want the version of this where somebody tells you the thing works, that is the version, and I am not going to pretend otherwise to seem humble.

Here is my problem.

About four months in I was driving home in weather that had been threatening all afternoon and finally arrived, one of those skies that goes green before it opens, and somebody came across two lanes in front of me and I did the thing. Room, seconds, nothing meant by it. Completely smooth. And about a mile later I noticed my jaw was aching, and I realised I had been holding it for the entire mile, and I had absolutely no idea what I was holding.

So which was it? Did I let something go, or did I get very efficient at putting it somewhere I do not have to look?

I cannot tell from the inside. That is the honest situation and I have been sitting in it since spring.

Because here is the thing about the road. The road is the easy case. That man was a stranger, he was gone in nine seconds, and I will never find out anything else about him for the rest of my life. Of course I can release that. There is nothing to hold on to. It is like being generous with money you were never going to spend.

The hard cases do not drive off. They are at Christmas. They text. They are people I have to keep having a relationship with while the account stays open, and when I try the same move there, something in me pulls back and says, careful, this one is different, if you set this down you will have agreed that it was fine. And it was not fine. And I do not know how to hold both of those at once, which is a thing I have watched people much further along than me apparently manage, and I have not worked out whether they solved it or just stopped mentioning it.

I have one piece of the answer and I want to be clear that it is one piece, not the answer.

Someone put it to me that release and absolution are different, and that I can stop carrying something without ruling that it was acceptable. I have been testing that for a few weeks and I think it is true. It is genuinely useful. When I remember it, something loosens. But it has not dissolved the problem, because I keep finding that my body has not read the memo. The distinction is clean in a sentence and the jaw does whatever the jaw does.

Maybe that is just what practice is. You get a true sentence first and the body catches up years later, or does not, and you keep driving either way.

The one thing I have got that feels solid, and it came from the failed part rather than the working part, is this: the jaw is data. On the days I actually put something down, there is nothing left over. No residue, no aching anything, and I usually cannot remember the incident by evening if I try. On the days I performed putting it down, there is always a leftover somewhere in the body, and it always shows up about a mile later. I did not decide that rule. I noticed it. And it means I have at least one honest instrument, even though I cannot see the difference at the moment I am making it.

So that is where I am. The small stuff works. The large stuff is unresolved. The instrument is my jaw, roughly a mile downstream, and it is more reliable than anything I could tell you about my own intentions.

What I am not going to do is finish this by tying it up. I have read enough pieces that raise a real doubt in paragraph six and then resolve it in paragraph twelve because the form demanded it, and I do not think that is honest, and I do not think it helps anybody standing where I am standing.

Here is what I actually think, provisionally, on a Saturday, subject to revision. I think letting go and looking away probably do feel identical at the moment you do them, and probably feel completely different an hour later, and I think that means the only way to tell is to keep doing it and pay attention to the hour after. That is not a technique. It is just a willingness to check.

Try it on something small this week, and then do the part nobody tells you to do: notice what your body is holding a mile later. Do not grade yourself on it. Just find out.

Has anyone reading this actually got to the other side of the hard cases, or are we all quietly running the small ones and hoping? I would genuinely like to know. If you are somewhere on this road too, come and walk with us and find the others. I would rather not work this one out alone.