Like Jay Gatsby, some of us like to recreate the past. Though for Gatsby, it wasn’t just a recreation, but an inability to let go of the past. He thought he still had it — his old love, his old self, the way things used to be. Nothing and no one around him convinced him otherwise.
I often fall deep into the past. I have a natural tendency to do so. I like lingering there sometimes, for I find it hard to let go of the comfort it once had. The comfort that is now just bitter and irrelevant to my present.
It’s like finishing a cigarette and watching the last bit of it burn, the smoke that once entangled you now just a memory. This is the past. What you lost cannot be recreated, for it no longer has the power to come back to life in its original form. Even in writing, you cannot recreate the feeling. What you wrote yesterday will not feel the same the next day.
My obstacle everyday is to let things to. Lately, I have had to let people go too. That has been the hardest and most challenging task. I have been going on the roof of my apartment in Brooklyn on these last few summer evenings where the air is gradually getting cooler. I stand there, awed by so much beauty around me that my struggles appear minute and insignificant. I let my sadness, my thoughts and reflections drift into the open air where no one can hold or touch them. No one listens. No one talks back. I simply let them drift and disappear into the atmosphere.
And then, for a brief moment, my soul calms a bit. My mind rests, for just a savory moment. I breathe in the feeling of calm. I stretch out my arms up toward the sky, and I let them fall once again. What’s left now is the present — the smell of fall, the faint breeze that ends the summer heat, the notion that I am still here, still standing, still dreaming of a bigger life. I can create the present…
This is letting go.