When to hold on, and when to let go

Letting go suggests abnegation. It's an act associated with doing nothing, passively slobbing out in front of the TV set every night. Clearly this is not how we should lead our lives. Abnegation is a waste of human potential. At the other end of the spectrum is a hyperactive determination to see through each one of your many resolutions - doing so perfectly, exactly as you had planned it.

Letting go is often seen as weakness. Hanging on, despite the effort, despite the cost, despite the pain, displays determination - which is regarded as the most laudable characteristic not just in humanity, but across all of nature. But it's not always the best option.

Knowing when to back down and when to stand and fight, when to keep investing in a lost cause and when to call it quits, is commonly thought as something that requires intelligence and fine judgment. For letting go means just that - ceasing to take any more interest in a given matter, walking away. But hanging on means work.

Consider a decision that needs to be taken. You run through several possible scenarios, each with its own alternative options; you think about each one on its strengths and weaknesses, you consider empirically how it will unfold... but then you find you have thought yourself into a standstill. Paralysis through analysis. "I don't know what to do!" 

OK - you might not know - but what do you intuit?

Decision making requires more than just intelligence alone, especially when the number of variables is too high to calculate rationally. Here, intuition is needed - intuition, not instinct. Not a gut-reaction, not a kneejerk. Not the hurrah-optimism of Brexiteers voting to screw the country's future on a whim or cheering on your army as it brutally invades your neighbour.

No, intuition is something metaphysical, beyond reductionist-materialist science. Intuition is that thought that presents itself to you unbidden, maybe as you wake, or shower, or while on a walk. Learning to heed intuition is a skill that we humans have not even begun to develop. It's not taught, it's often dismissed as a cognitive bias, as a symptom of wishful thinking.

Learning to go with the flow is not synonymous with passive fatalism, but actively wishing luck. Good fortune. By being conscious of the outcomes rather than by analysing flow-paths and critical points. Letting the optimal outcome happen neither by making a decision and then obstinately sticking with it to the end, nor by letting fate take the wheel, but by being flexible, adaptable - and willing the optimal outcome from out of the future*. 

And when that optimal outcome does happen - be grateful  for it! Experience the conscious feeling of deep gratitude. It could easily have gone the other way.

But what is the optimal outcome? It resides at the meta level, not at the material level.

And here we get into the realms of the supernatural. Letting go means placing trust in a higher order than just the cause-and-effect of rationalism. The optimal outcome should be one that elevates the whole, that stands one tiny step closer to One on the infinitely long path from Zero to One. It might not look that way from where you are right now; but with the passage of time, all becomes clearer.

Willing that outcome is more possible than simply desiring material benefits to boost the ego.

* Which, according to some physicists, has already happened, and exists co-equally with the past and present.

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