A Little Bit of Letting Go

Every one of us on this planet has some big lesson to learn (I think a few of us have several!). One of mine is to learn to let go of things, to cede to something rather than to fight it tooth and nail, all the way to the end, my adrenaline pumping as I do.

So instead of just saying, "Okay. This is what is happening. I will follow plan A and see what happens," I follow plan A and then start plan B before plan A has even run its course. I will call everyone I know and talk about plan A and plan B, worrying them with my worry. I will hang up the phone and worry some more, thinking about plan C, which sounds better than the other plans. So why not start it now?

Meanwhile, I'll have spent so much time doing all of this, going back and forth, I won't see that the problem somehow resolved itself.

Case in point: This November in the San Francisco Bay Area, we had a week of almost 80 degree weather. It was the summer we didn't have this summer. We were all wandering around in our t-shirts and shorts, loving life. At least, I was until this type of fly I'd never heard about caught wind of the unseasonable weather, too, and started to emerge from its winter dormancy. Who knew about cluster flies? Well, I do.

For a week after the weather went back to normal, I had flies "clustering" in my windows. Plan A was to kill them. I did so all day long, going off on fly massacres. Plan B--that I began during the fly raids--was to research the darn things, and then find solutions. Poison didn't seem like a great idea, not with visitors soon to be living in the afflicted rooms. Traps, yes! So I FedExed one to arrive, well, it hasn't. Back to plan A. Plan B was to worry about them, going under and around the house, looking for the way they came in, which I found. Up went small screens, that will help with next year's batch, but not these in my house.

Worry, worry, worry.

And then, two days ago, the flies just stopped. Nothing I had done had effected them (except for those poor dead ones). Whatever clock that told them to wake up and go forth into spring was reset. All my worry, plans, machinations were for naught.

So my new metaphor is to think about the cluster fly. Things will happen over which I will have little control. And then, these things will end, often without whatever I might have tried responsible.

Cluster fly. I hope I remember.

Jessica Barksdale Inclan

(An aside: I made this fun video as a trailer experiment for my ebook Becca's Best. I hope you will give it a view)