Neuro Enhancement

By Jeff Schoener

Should You Hold On or Do You Let Go?

The more life seems difficult, many of us are advised to hold on tight until this part of the ride smoothes over.  For others, the advice is to let go and ride the current or the wave.

What if you get both pieces of advice?   How could we possibly do both at the same time?  Letting go and holding on seems incongruent.  Systematically the tighter our grip, the less we may ease up.

Within linear thought this concept is a bit confusing to the point of an unknown Abbot and Costello comedy routine.  Paradoxically, from different perspectives, this concept makes sense.  Let us play with the metaphor around the action and notice the perceptual shift.  If we think of ‘life’ as a boat with a steering control, letting go is quite different than thinking of ‘life as a rough sea.  The vehicle we are holding onto must let go and ride out the storm.  If we only perceive the boat, we fail to know when there is an end.   If we only perceive the storm, the boat appears to have no control at all.  If we hold our course, aimed into the storm and ride it out, the rough will calm and the boat will have taken little or no damage.  We would have held on and let go in a paradoxically perfect way.