The pain that keeps on Hurting

The pain of holding on is different from the pain pain of letting go. If you are at a point where you are able to let go, you are at a point to accept the loss and begin the healing process. However, if you are holding on, even while your fingers are being pried painfully off in fractional degrees, then the pain that you are feeling is not the pure pain of immediate loss, it is a tangled up mess of emotions compounded by the amount of time used continuing to cling to something that your inner wisdom has told you, cannot or will not, be sustained.

So while letting go can be likened to a knife slice to the wrist, a sharp and stinging pain that will let your life’s blood out in a matter of minutes, holding on can be compared to that same knife stabbing you in the gut and then twisting whenever you think that maybe the pain has become tolerable. While the stomach wound will evenutally kill you, it will not be as quick as the slash to the forearm, and may even require help from complications like infection before the job is done. In this way, the puncture to the gut, while it allows you precious extra time, exacts a horrendous price in terms of suffering.

And though letting go takes courage, just as a leap into the abyss that is the unknown takes us to a point of no returning, the grasping uncertainty of holding on does not release us from fear, it merely prolongs it. In my books, letting go, while it often seems like the more difficult of the two choices, is by far the easier in the long run.