Many of you wrote to me to share your feelings around my rat experience, and I really appreciated reading all of them. I will reply individually, but I first wanted to start by saying again that I appreciate your messages in my inbox.
The rat problem was something I couldn't "let it be". A few years I had a roach problem and again that was something I couldn't "let it be". As we live life we're surrounded by things we want to control, things we want to let go, things we want to control but can't, things we want to let go but can't, and so on.
What is something I've let go, let it be in my life? I think the biggest one was my relationship with my mom. Her opinion and approval meant everything to me as it was pretty much the definition of life for me. After becoming an adult and starting my own family (by marriage, no kids) I came to realize that I can't equally be a 100% good son and a 100% good husband at the same time.
So I decided to become a good husband. This isn't really that big of a deal, but prior to making this decision it felt like my entire life was going to collapse because well, the prior definition of my life WAS actually collapsing. The thing is, just because I decide to be a good husband first doesn't mean I'm gonna cuss out my mom and burn my family photos. But the mind likes to participate in extreme black or white thinking and it was tremendously difficult to let my mom be with my direction of life.
Somewhat anticlimactically, nothing really happened because no matter what she said, I just let it be. Which means I did a pretty good job in making the decision to be a good husband first. I don't mean that in, "good job Billy! You get a pat on the back!", I mean it in the lines of I committed to the decision well so that I don't waver back and forth on my decision.
If I had made the decision half-heartedly or if I felt pressured to make the decision against my will, the smallest quiver in my mom's voice will make me retreat back into the figurative womb I was so familiar with. But the decision was a simple one: I just needed to let her be regardless of what she said or did.
Happiness in marriage is also a bit of letting things be. My wife does things, I let it be and this could not have made things better. One striking example of this is my inability to sleep next to her when she's awake. My wife is a night owl and I used to be a very sensitive sleeper who has never owned an analog clock because I'm bugged by the clicks of the second hand.
Every night my wife would be on the bed doing her things, waiting to feel sleepy enough. I would be (figuratively) blinded by the backlight of her phone. Her fingers, not nails, hitting the on screen keyboard and that little vibration it causes to the bed would prevent me from sleeping. I would endure and endure and eventually I'll ask her: "can I please go to sleep?"
Which is a ridiculous question because she's not responsible for my sleep, I am. With self development I formed a new relationship with sleep and now I just let my wife do whatever she wants on the bed while I'm knocked out. Turns out being micro-stressed every night at your partner has some big accruing effects; thankfully I was able to notice the accruing stress by the lack of it after my thought transition.
Much of meditation is letting things be. I have an itch on my third eye. My glasses are pressing on my nose a little weird. I can't stop playing Golden in my head (We're going UP UP UP). I just let it be and focus instead on what I want to focus on, which is my breath in most cases.
Here's the kicker and the primary topic of today. There's a lot of things you can learn to let go or let be, with varying degrees of difficulty. Letting strangers be is easy peasy, because all you have to do is nothing. Letting someone who annoys you be is more difficult, because it has an effect on you. Again, it's not impossible and with time and introspection you can let a lot of things be.
But what about yourself?
The thing is, our self-controlling and self-expecting tendencies are so deeply innate to us we never even bother to think about letting ourselves be. Some call this shame, some call this self-judgment, but whatever we name it it's this phenomenon of being unable to let ourselves be.
For example, I find myself being angry at a three year old kid shouting at her mommy throughout my flight to Honolulu. Actually, suppose this is you. What would you do in this case, if the goal is to be at peace with this situation?
The most common reaction is to try and control ourselves. We want to change ourselves so that we're not angry at the kid. We want to tone down the anger. We want the anger to subside, we try to force ourselves to understand the child. We just can't let ourselves be in this state of anger.
What if we considered this? At this moment, I'm pretty angry at the kid because I can't sleep. While letting myself be, I'm going to start waking myself up or read a book because this is a situation I need to adapt to, rather than fight with. When I do this, I only deal with the future side of the situation.
Turns out the future side of the situation can be dealt with... Without dealing with the past side of the situation (the past side being, anger). I don't NEED to do anything to the anger for me to adapt to the situation. I'm angry because I've trained myself extensively to be annoyed at stimuli that wakes me from my sleep. This is a consequence from my past, and only that; I don't need to do anything with it.
But our default instinct is to continue wrestling with the past side. We want to change ourselves, we want to keep prodding with our anger so that we don't feel it. Sometimes we suppress it, sometimes we explode with it, in any case we keep doing something with it. We just can't let ourselves be.
You may really, really not like yourself. You may be really, really frustrated at yourself. The thing is, you don't need to change that to be the person you want to be. The person you want to be lives in the future plane and we keep trying to change the past plane. It just compounds the difficulty of working in the future plane.
This year in my introspection I realized I was deeply resentful for people who voice their opinions because I had to hold my opinions inside for the good of collective peace. How dare you speak up and disrupt the peace that I'm trying so hard to uphold? This resentment was living inside of me all my life but this is the year I actually noticed it in my life, how deeply it was rooted in my psyche.
And I'm so glad I met that part of me this year because this is also the year I learned how to let myself be. This me is the only me I have available to me today. I continue carving, chiseling this me regardless of what state I'm in today because it's the only thing I can do.
Turns out, I'm not a saint. And that's not a problem. Turns out, I live in a world full of people like me and I'm really, really not better than them. And that's not a problem at all. Turns out, I have parts of me that I think should be better. And by golly, that's not a problem at all.
Billy Seol
July Life Coach
julylifecoach.com
