The Path is The Goal
This past Saturday, I went for coffee with a friend I hadn’t seen in two years. We worked together over a decade ago, back when I was trying desperately to make my part-time hospital admin gig into a full-time hospital admin gig, convinced as I was that I was Never Going To Make It as a writer. Never going to get to that point of writing full-time, never going to publish another novel, never going to do anything with my writing that I was proud of or excited by. Never going to make enough money from writing to survive. Never never never.
Fast forward ten or so years, and look: I am here. Writing full-time. Meeting her on a warm summer Saturday in my linen shirt and my famous white pants.
“I love the grey hairs around your face!” she said. “They look so pretty!”
I laughed out loud at this, even as my insides twinged a little.
Grey hairs? I thought. Well, I guess so. Can’t we just pretend they…aren’t there?
We had a wonderful time. Later, after we’d gone our separate ways, she sent me a text. You project such warmth and peace.
I was so happy, hearing that. And then I thought about that twinge over my grey hair and laughed all over again.
One more thing to let go of, it seems. Life continues to throw them up at me, no matter where I turn.
![A white hand holds a wisp of white cloud against a stormy grey sky, letting the wisp disintegrate into the wind. A white hand holds a wisp of white cloud against a stormy grey sky, letting the wisp disintegrate into the wind.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe85b7b4a-0a00-460b-814b-084e8697935a_2624x3280.jpeg)
As the months went on into that first year after Jess died, I noticed that the physical pain of grief was making its way through my body. First, it sat as a tangled mass of something in my throat. An animal that threatened to choke me evety time I turned my head.
Then, as the weeks went on, it migrated a little lower, until the tangled mass of something became a steady, soft pressure on my sternum. I was not choking as much, but one thing could tip me over, make me suddenly as red and raw and scratchy in my esophagus and lungs as in those first few early days.
Then, after more time, the grief moved lower still. The pain a swirled fist between the lungs.
Waking up in the middle of the night in tears, not knowing what to say, where to go.
I love you. I love you. I love you.
Where are you? Where have you gone?
More days, more weeks, more months. Lower, lower, lower. Heartache, yes. But also chest ache, and gut ache, and aches like cramps that were not cramps.
You see? I heard the pain say, one night in early summer when I had finally gone still enough to listen. You can’t turn away from me either. I am everywhere you look; I am inside of you, and outside, and I will pass through you as many times as I please.
The only thing left for you to do is pay attention.
It would be a few more years before that swirled fist of something let go into something else, loosening and taking with it so many other rigid anxieties. It feels like even more years have passed—though it hasn’t been that long—since I’ve come to recognize that that “letting go” wasn’t actually a letting go as such, but more of a “letting be”.
Letting the grief be what it is. Letting my life be what it is. As though I’d been bobbing in a little boat my whole life long, beating ceaselessly against the current, because rowing against the current was exactly what I needed to do to keep everything together. Only to wake up one day and realize that the river will continue to flow regardless of whether I am beating against it or not.
The river will take you wherever it wants, eventually. No matter how hard you paddle against it.
Pema Chodrön notes that letting be can often be easier for people than letting go, at least at first. It’s hard to let go when we’ve been taught to equate letting go with giving up, with letting down, with abandoning.
Don’t give up, we say. Just try a little harder. Success is just around the corner. Love is just around the corner. Everything you want? It’s just around the corner—you just need to work a little more.
If you give up? we say. Then your boat is going to rocket down the river and over that waterfall and nothing but disaster will ensue. So many things are waiting to swallow you.
I believed this for decades. It was my whole thing. I was beating against the current trying not to get sucked into that waterfall, and also I was paddling relentlessly in order to get to that Other Shore. Avoid disaster, and also move to Somewhere Better. And when that Other Shore (new apartment, new job, publications, book deal!) was reached? That Somewhere Better? Inevitably another shore would materialize on the horizon and I’d renew the focus on paddling again—not just survival, but survival with more.
Row, row, row your boat. Doggedly up the stream.
It’s really no wonder, isn’t it, that I was exhausted all of the time. You can only fight the current for so long.
Letting my grief go, which is to say letting it be what it is, has been such a revelation. It has bled into so many other elements of life. A year or so ago I sat down to do some meditating and just could not get my mind in gear—it was angry and sad and tossing for a whole host of reasons. I contemplated getting up and giving up, over and over. And then finally I just said okay, if I’m going to be angry, then I’m just going to be angry.
And that was it. That was all! I sat for the rest of that session and seethed. Eventually I got up and went about the rest of the day and the anger dissipated without my realizing it, as it always does. The next time I sat down on my mediation mat, things were a little easier.
Looking back, it’s hard not to feel like that was a huge kind of victory. But it actually wasn’t: in some ways, it was the easiest kind of letting be. Instead of fighting against the current of that anger I just said okay, these are angry waves, and we are just going to sit in this boat and ride them out.
The grief is going to come, and instead of fighting with it I’m just going to sit with it, and ride it out.
It feels both revolutionary and also so simple. You can just…be who you are? Be with your emotions? Say hello to them and cradle them and whisper it’s okay, I am here, I will take care of us? You can just let go of all the expectations you had for your life and allow the river to take you where it will? And everything will actually be okay, even if you end up going over that waterfall in the end?
What wild heaven is this?
Sometimes I feel as though letting go of my grief over Jess—letting that be what it is, which is to say this horrendous, uncomfortable thread of longing that is never going to disappear—was a gateway to letting go of other kinds.
Letting go of one future so that another could take its place.
Letting go of the possibility of a certain kind of parenthood (which maybe opens the door for others).
Letting go of a safe, financially predictable kind of life (which maybe opens the door for another).
I’m sensing a theme here. Are you? The old cliché: when one door closes, another opens. The kicker is that you can’t see the second door at all until you’ve closed the first one.
For most of my life I stood in front of a Happiness Door and tried, in vain, to step across the threshold. On the other side of that door were so many things I was convinced I wanted: love and friendship and marriage and children and hugely successful books and travel all over the world and so many other wonderful things. Jess, waiting with me to visit them all.
But try as I might—and I tried so bloody hard—I could never seem to cross the threshold in any of the ways that felt important. There was always somewhere better to be. If we go back to the me-in-my-little-boat metaphor, it was like paddling around to a series of ever-larger islands only to have them always exactly out of reach.
And then Jess died, and I was forced to reckon with letting go in the way that only grief can force you to. As the fog of those immediate years after her death began to lift, I found myself looking out at the life and things that I thought I’d wanted for so long and thinking: but if I can survive without her, and even thrive, then maybe…I can survive (and even thrive!) without these other things, too.
Maybe the storm that finally sweeps you over the waterfall is its own kind of gift. Maybe this is how you get to new islands you would otherwise never have seen.
I’ve really been enjoying this new “let it be” stage of life. I feel like I’m letting go of things that no longer feel important, and in the process stepping onto a new path that 100% feels like it was meant to be mine. As though this was always where I was meant to be, and I needed to do all of the things—paddle fiercely and face that storm and get swept away in the end—in order to realize it.
I needed to shut that first door, finally, in order to feel the sun shine through the new surprise door that has just now opened up.
And all is fine and dandy, and then I go for coffee with a friend and life throws me that reminder of my greys and I realize ah yes, one more thing to let go of, Leduc! Still clinging!
My new novel is out on submission to publishers in the US and the UK and it’s been out on submission for a while. I am beginning to suspect that it probably isn’t going to get picked up, and it’s so frustrating.
One more thing to let go of, Leduc! Still clinging!
As much as I’m enjoying my new freelance lifestyle, I am definitely struggling with feeling peace around money. (Less peace, more terror is what it feels like most days.)
One more thing to let go of, Leduc! Still clinging!
I think I’m mostly okay with aging (I love my forties like I’ve never loved any decade), and then a friend points out my grey hair and it knocks me sideways, for a bit.
Still clinging! Still clinging!
Letting go. As it turns out, it’s a lifelong meditation.
Here’s the kicker: this friend who knew me over a decade ago, at the hospital? She knew me when I was going through the deepest depression I’ve ever experienced. So if she says you project such warmth and peace, something big has happened.
It reminds me of the passage from Eat, Pray, Love when Liz Gilbert is in India, at an ashram, trying desperately to calm her chatty nature and develop a quiet, steady sense of peace and grace. But it’s only when she gives in to her outgoing nature and accepts a hostess role at the ashram—a role that involves more talking and front-facing customer service-type stuff, a role right up her alley—that her true gifts of peace and grace begin to shine for others.
I thought—silly, ridiculous me—that I needed to have a warm, peaceful life in order to be a warm and peaceful person. And I thought that warm, peaceful life would happen as long as I worked hard and got everything in line. If I controlled everything then I wouldn’t be anxious, and if I wasn’t anxious, then I wouldn’t be sad, and if I wasn’t sad, peace could come!
But it’s only been through the embrace of grief and uncertainy—through giving control up, and accepting what is —that any kind of peace has come to me.
The path is the goal—this is what we say, in Buddhism, over and over. The goal is not to get somewhere: the goal is just being on the path in the first place. Recognizing that you’re just in your life, bobbing in that little boat. Waves will come, but they will also go. And that is how everything happens.
Your only job here is to stay in the boat. Down the river and over the waterfall and through the rapids, down a stream as still as glass. You stay in the boat. You stay on the path. There is nowhere else to be. You grieve on the path and breathe on the path and be on the path. That’s it!
You can spend your life paddling. Or you can stop, and let the river take you where it was always going to take you anyway. Grey hairs and all.
And then maybe one day you’ll sit across from your friend in the midst of your new who-knows-what-happens-now stage of life, and all she’ll see is warmth and peace. And you’ll laugh because surely this is the best kind of cosmic joke there is—you wanted warmth and peace and security amd reached for them in all the ways you could, but it was only when you stopped reaching for these things—and, indeed, let go of many others—that they came to you at all.
Gotcha! says the Universe.
Gotcha, every time.