Mind Set Go

It’s easy to talk about moving on, about getting over loss, about losing weight and exercising.  It’s a way of life: reminiscing about what we had while also wondering about what is to be.  What exactly is “moving on” and letting go?  While we can embrace that there is a huge difference between thinking about something and actually doing it, why do we get so bogged down in a mire of what-ifs and cudda-beens?  Is what we need a way to clear that out of our minds?  If so, how do we do it? 

First of all, clearing one’s mind doesn’t mean forgetting.  It’s good to remember.  There is a clear difference, however, between what we remember and mind clutter.

I can remember what my hair looked like when it was longer than now, when it was dyed and highlighted and when, I believe, people seemed to associate me with that.  Body parts now “lost” replaced with scars have not really affected me.  But the hair change has.  I find myself telling people I meet, strangers, that I didn’t use to look the way I do now.  So, not only do I remember what I looked like, but there is something there that is new.  I’m not totally embracing who I am now if I feel compelled to tell people that I was different before. 

And by the way, the way I look isn’t who I am now… Is it?  A huge part of who I am is surely what is in my mind and how I use my mind—right?  Who I am now has very little to do with what I remember about how I looked in the past and has very much to do with the mind clutter (the not so pure and simple “mind clutter”) I presently keep in my mind.

When did what I feel become so associated with how I think?  And is how I think directly proportional with what I feel?  And if so, does it have to be?  How are we using our minds, and how does that affect the ways we feel?  (Using our minds can embrace not using the mind in conventional ways.)

Although I was bald, I have hair now, and actually being bald was, relatively speaking, a short time in my life.  It was something I feared and worried about.  I cut my long hair and sent it away to have a wig made from it.  The pandemic got in the way, and the wig company had issues.  By the time the wig made of my own hair came back to me, I had already lost all of my hair, and it was already starting to grow back in what would become various stages.  At first my hair was all white.  Then other colors came in. My normally straight hair was wavy.  After a year and a half of having new hair, my own new hair, all of the white hair fell out.  I was left with an interesting shade of gray I never imagined I would have.  Part of me rather likes it.

I could dye my hair now to look much like it looked before.  But, I don’t really want to.  I don’t want to put dyes on my skin while the hair would process.  Yet I know that lots of people live long, long lives with dyed hair.  Although I know and knew a couple of hairdressers who have had cancer, many never develop cancer.  So, I’m in this mind clutter conundrum.  In some ways I’m bold and emboldened.  In other ways, I fret and say, “I used to look so young and different than this.”   (At least I thought so at the time, and people were shocked when I told them my actual age.)  Although I could go on having a hairdresser recreate what I had before, I’m not that person any more.  And yet I seem to be a person who has not yet fully embraced all of the changes I have had in the last 3 plus years.  I seem to be mourning change for just a little longer when it comes to this new look—which is, in fact, somewhat by choice.  Some people have not recognized me anymore, but those people didn’t know me very well, and so I try not to take it personally!

Do we have to mourn change?  Most of us probably agree that mourning is natural; it’s is a process.  We all mourn in our own ways, in our own time.  It’s primal.  One of Merriam-Webster’s definitions of the word natural is “occurring in conformity with the ordinary course of nature: not marvelous or supernatural.” 

Mourning is natural.  Change is natural.  But, is cancer natural?  We tend to think that good health is natural and bad health is not.  I would dare to assert that most of us believe that natural is what occurs in this world in a positive progression without the ill effects of some humanly imposed effect that causes pollution, sudden death, cancer and societal scourges as unnatural consequences.  Many of us believe that humans are messing up what is natural and pure and beautiful.  If we believe all of that, then what do we make of ourselves when we develop something such as cancer?  Wouldn’t it be natural to mourn the day when we were not touched by the diagnosis that somehow thrust us into the pitfalls of self-conceived victim, marked for life and left wondering how we fit in and what our futures hold?    

What do we make of all of this?  I would suggest that we have to be kind.  Kind to ourselves.  But is kindness natural?  Is it something we do, or is it something we become?  Does kindness embody mindclutter?  Does kindness perseverate? 

I am not a victim of cancer.  I am natural and beautiful and kind and, although far from perfect, very much pure at heart.   I matter.  Yes, I have mind clutter.  I am human.  Humans have mind clutter of varying degrees.  And only through kindness can we embrace the mind clutter to let it (or much of it) go.  We have to embrace things to let them go.

We have to embrace mourning.

We have to embrace change.

We have to embrace sickness.

We have to embrace health.

All of these things are natural as in our very private, very personal progression of being in this moment… this here and now that is somehow sandwiched between what was before and what is to come.  In living.

Distinguish between remembering and letting go.  It’s okay.

Fully embrace what you had before and allow what you have now, the new you, the new moment, however changed, to be.

Be the moment. 

The time will come when mourning will cease.  In the meantime, embrace the now.  Allow yourself the grace to mourn.  To remember.  And in time, you will emerge from the cocoon a new being.  But that birthing takes time and grace and honor and love and kindness.   It’s okay.  It’s okay, and it’s okay that it takes time.

PS: I lost what I believed to be a very inspired (and perhaps inspirational) blog posting.  It was on a laptop I had used for years.  The unpublished, lost blog posting contained books I wanted to recommend in small reviews and it contained all sorts of creative capital that cannot be measured.  That laptop also contained a play I had written… and maybe a poem or two now lost. Although I had saved most of what was on that laptop, (that laptop that I had used so much that I had worn out several keyboards that had to be replaced) I was left mourning the loss of the unsaved work from the last year and a half.  I brought the computer to two places in an attempt to save the information.  It seems it might be capable of saving it if I spend several thousands of dollars in recovering the hard drive?  Letting go comes in many forms.  Recovering from loss is dynamic and multifaceted.  Someone actually said to my husband, “Oh, you mean it wasn’t your computer?  It was your wife’s?  Well, if she had some recipe on it, I guess you need to decide whether the cost of recovery is worth it.”  I am attempting to let go of my response to that presently.  By the way, my recipes matter, and so do I.