Some weeks ago, one of my best friends invited me to go with her to attend a performance by Bread and Puppet Theater. I’d been hearing amazing things about Bread and Puppet for years, but this was the first time I found myself in a position to attend a performance. I assure you – this will not be my last. Breathtaking costumes, a mix of intense drama and lighthearted poking at the Establishment, their style and approach had me hooked from the first moment.

We want you to understand that theater is not yet an established form, not the place of commerce you think it is, where you pay to get something. Theater is different. It is more like bread, more like a necessity. Theater is a form of religion. It preaches sermons and builds a self-sufficient ritual. Puppet theater is the theater of all means. Puppets and masks should be played in the street. They are louder than the traffic. They don’t teach problems, but they scream and dance and display life in its clearest terms. Puppet theater is of action rather than dialogue. The action is reduced to the simplest dance-like and specialized gestures. A puppet may be a hand only, or it may be a complicated body of many heads, hands, rods and fabric.

We have two types of puppet shows: good ones and bad ones, but all of them are for good and against evil. -Peter Schumann

One feature I found delightfully accessible was the “cheap art” available for sale after the performance.

During intermission, Anna and I perused the cheap art for sale in the lobby. I found a piece of art that spoke to me and garnered a bit of surprise from Anna. She saw what I wanted to buy, gave me a perplexed look and said, “but you never wait.”

She certainly isn’t wrong. When I meet a girl who seems somewhat close to my ideal, I dive in and try to make things fit. I don’t wait patiently for the “right” girl to come along, but adapt and contort myself until my prezeled state prevents me from remembering why I stepped into the relationship in the first place. After relationships inevitably end and I gain some perspective, I see the vast chasms between who I am and who I tried to become to meet the other person where they were.

By spending so much of my energy on adapting myself to meet a partner where they wish to be, I postpone the joy of finding my own path; setting aside my desires and my passions to prioritize finding a girl to share them with.

What am I waiting for? I’ve been waiting to actually live my life while I searched for a partner to share that life with me. I’ve had this all backwards! I need to take that “don’t wait” energy and apply it to my own life first. I need to go and do things, to take chances and climb mountains and experience life. Only then will I find a partner to share these adventures with me.

Even more complicated, maybe I did meet the right girl already but I missed it because I wasn’t focused enough on living my life to the fullest.

I think it’s time to let go of waiting to live my life. New mantra: No more waiting – time for living.

In November of 2011, I participated in my first ever National Novel Writing Month. The challenge is this: Write 50,000 words of a novel in the span of the month of November. It was a bit of a last minute decision to jump in, and not only did I participate but I actually “won” by completing my 50,000 words. That’s not to say it was all amazing writing – much of it is less than fabulous – but it’s remarkable how hard it is to just crank out that first draft. Once you have something to work with, you can edit, revise, hire other people to edit and so on, but while the story exists only inside your head there’s nothing you can do but WRITE.

I set the book aside after NaNoWriMo and have picked it up a few time over the years, but each time I found myself stuck on a small but vital detail. The story hinges on the protagonist’s ability to travel between the real world and multiple dream worlds and I couldn’t figure out how to describe the primary dream world, which is essential to the second half of the book. I had many ideas and thoughts and tried and forced and pushed but the way to tell that piece just wouldn’t come.

Last week, a very new friend sent me a text essentially asking “what are you doing this weekend.” Fast forward a few days and I found myself driving to Boston with him for the weekend to participate in a Sacred Harp all day sing (and yes, I had to Google “Sacred Harp Singing” because I had absolutely no idea what he was asking me to do). At 11 pm Friday night, I found myself curled up in a twin bed in a stranger’s apartment, having traveled there with a friend I have known for only a few months, and only just recently have started to hang out with outside of choir practice. I was amused at my conservative risk taking – several people knew where I was and my sister lives very close by so I could call her if I needed anything – but also was pleased I was trying something new and outside my comfort zone.

Lying half asleep in that bed, letting my mind wander without much direction, I suddenly sat up straight and dove for my writing notebook. At a time when I least expected it, I figured out how to write the dream world so it would connect to the real world in the way I wanted it to. Interestingly (or perhaps not so) it was a simple solution: I had been embellishing to a degree that the dream world was feeling forced and contrived. By letting it go and by lessening the specificity I found the gentle solution I’d been looking for.

I think this is often a tendency for me.  I try to force things to fit and contort myself in the process so even when the pieces are linked together, I’m bent so impossibly that nothing is comfortable. I need to take a deep breath, step back from whatever is going on, and make sure I’m doing the right thing. Am I happy with this situation? Am I changing myself in a way that is healthy for me or am I bending over backward to meet someone else’s expectations or wants? If I just let things be and let them evolve, the answers will come to me; the solutions of what to do next and how to make this work will come if I don’t force them.

Today I’m letting go of trying to force things to fit. Whether it’s a story I need to tell or whatever is next for my life, I need to take a deep breath and just let things happen. I can still go for what I want in life and not shy away from making things happen for myself, but I need to let go of forcing things to fit, when they don’t.

When I began my 4(2) Days of Letting Go, I imagined that for 42 days I would write about one thing per day, finishing six weeks later with a lovely list of 42 things I could let slide off my shoulders. Life, of course, rarely follows the straightforward path I frequently imagine. Instead, the path curves in unpredictable directions, doubling back on itself, sometimes skipping up the side of a mountain or hiding irritably in a pool of mud for a while. As my 42 Days have roughly followed Lent, I should be wrapping them up sometime this week, while in reality I’ve only posted 14 up on the blog so far.

Deep breath. Today I’m letting go of the past, so I can keep moving forward.

Several years ago my mother gave me and my sister each a ten year journal. The journal has ten entries per page, one per year for a specific day. This way you can write on April the 21st of 2014 and see what you wrote on April 21st four years ago, and on this day for every year in between. My mother and my sister diligently write in their journals, scarcely missing a day. Mine looks more like a block of Swiss cheese, haphazard entries here and there and large gaping holes throughout. I actively ignore this journal on a regular basis. It squats, toad-like on my bookshelf, staring me down and reminding me that it should be gathering more than dust each day. My internal stress from the journal’s inactivity (see Day 3: Letting Go of Guilt) hunches my shoulders a bit, but I’ve found the journal imparts more stress when I try to buckle down and write in it every day than it does from its lurking on my bookshelf.

There are many reasons why – distaste from seeing the shenanigans of my life over the last several years, discomfort at seeing how lackadaisical I am at completing this seemingly simple task, and the internal pressure I place on myself to try to remember to write in the damn thing. I think the main issue with the ten year journal is every time I pick it up I am quite literally faced with how I’ve often failed at this before. I see the empty pages, scattered entries, and all the times I didn’t write in the past, which makes it more difficult to actually sit down and write today.

Did I manage my 42 days of letting go? Not according to my original plan, but I’m not giving up. I’ll keep plugging away until I complete my list of 42, and I will keep working to let these things go. I’m hoping that by fleshing them out into longer blog posts I’ll be able to maintain my momentum and finish off the list, even if I do it at a slower pace.

Based on the recommendations of G+ friends, I’m also thinking the Five Minute Journal might be a good next step to push myself to journal daily, with each day as a new blank page ready for me to fill.

I often get stuck inside my own head. Busy with questions and possible answers, fears and worries about things that will likely never come to pass, unnecessary analysis of the inner workings of my world. One way I can break myself out of this none-to-helpful cycle is with music.

Today my go to is the Chad Hollister Band – their song “The Answer” has played on repeat inside my brain and you can listen to it here. I couldn’t find a version of it on YouTube, so I also included a video of one of the Chad Hollister Band’s other songs that is equally fantastic. Enjoy 🙂

Though I have a lack of empirical proof to support my theory, a vast number of my friends and acquaintances seem to be atheists and agnostics. I’m surrounded by a collection of folks to whom organized religion sounds more like a form of torture than a fun, voluntary activity.

My good friend Toni asked me to hang out after work one Wednesday and I told her I couldn’t go out because I had choir practice. Her disbelieving brows echoed the “like, church choir?” that came out of her mouth, a typical reaction I get from many of my friends when they learn I attend church on a pretty regular basis.

I’m not one of those who tosses my faith in anyone’s face – I think it’s not anyone’s business but my own – but as it applies to this post I’ll share a smidge. I was raised Episcopalian (think Catholic-lite) and as an adult I’ve tended toward attending Christian churches, usually Congregational or UCC. As a girl who frequently gets stuck narrating in her own head, church has been a way for me to pull my thinking outside of myself and feel more connected to the world around me.

Last night, I drove to my church for choir practice, and discovered that the church was holding an Ash Wednesday service, with choir practice to follow.  The pastor provided us all with a slip of paper that said “God, I pray for…” with space to write a prayer. Later in the service, the slips of paper were burned to ash and that ash combined with oil was used to make the oily ash (ashy oil?) crosses on foreheads of parishioners.

Here’s what I wrote on my slip:

I pray for the courage to forgive myself – to release myself from expectations of perfection and to really live my life.

Elissa, the pastor, (picture someone about my age, with a nose ring, who isn’t afraid to shake things up) looked around at everyone and said the next 40 days of Lent are about letting go. She said “now’s your chance to transform what holds you back.” This really hit home for me. Inspired by her words, I have decided to try something a little different. Rather than give up something like chocolate or soda for Lent, I’m going to let go of something every day for 42 days (yes, Lent is only 40 days, but how could I pass up a chance for 42?) and then check in to see how I’m feeling at the end.

Day 1: Today I let go of my fear of failure

I sometimes do things that feel like failure, and I sometimes do things that feel like success, but I am not my failures. Unfortunately, it also means I am not my successes. Letting go of the attachment to claiming successes as integral to my sense of self will free me from the reciprocal need to claim the failures as some dysfunctional aspect of myself. I am giving myself permission to fail and to really know it doesn’t define me.

I will also admit, since I started working on a post about letting go, I haven’t been able to get the song from Frozen out of my head…