Let Go of the Sand
Relationship management, with yourself and others, is always a tough, nuanced thing to untangle. What works for you at the given moment may not work in a couple months or years, or what works for you with your professional relationships doesn’t apply in your romantic relationships. It’s a topic that I’ve been fascinated about for quite some time, and I came across a gem of an analogy in this podcast show between Whitney Cummings and Ramy Youssef. Whitney Cummings shares a simple, yet profound insight on intimacy in relationships:
“If you hold sand in your hand like this *palm open*, you can hold it forever. But if you hold it like this *palm closed fist*, you’ll lose it.”
This is such a beautiful analogy for all of our relationships. Letting go and having less of an entrenchment with something or someone is ultimately key to uncovering the hidden liberties in your relationships.
There are two examples that immediately come to mind when I think of the closed palm/fist part of the sand analogy:
Relationship with Stress
As I’ve discussed in previous posts, our self relationship is dictated by our mind and its power over our own being. Primitively, we are all wired to stress out about anything and everything throughout our lifetime.
But think of your own life and sanity as the sand and your stressors as the palm from the analogy. The more you allow the stressors to envelop your life, you start to lose yourself - and not in the good way neither.
Romantic Relationships
You’ve seen it before or experienced it yourself - a romantic partnership feels stifling when there are certain dynamics that have been established. The psychological hold over yourself is too much to handle, and you go through the same negative cycle as discussed above with your relationship with stress.
Years can be taken off your life with the unnecessary burden of keeping the palm closed throughout different spaces in your life. So how do you keep the palm open for as long as possible? In my view, it all comes down to a matter of spatial perception.
Spatial perception is the ability to be aware and in tune with your relationship with the space or the environment around you (exteroceptive processes) and with yourself (interoceptive processes). Although it is typically viewed from a more physical lens, I’d like to delve into the psychological lens associated with our spatial perception.
Environment and boundaries are defining elements in this psychological understanding of spatial perception. The beauty in these elements is the fact that you, more often than not, have direct control over shaping and defining them. You can choose what environments you put yourself in at specific times of day, and you can clearly define boundaries for yourself that allow you to achieve greater intimacy in your relationships. It’s odd that as I write this, I’ve come to realize a somewhat paradoxical epiphany to support a long-standing belief:
Control what you can control. When it comes to letting go, you have to control what you can control in order to no longer let others control you.
My head is still spinning from reading and re-reading that thought. Let me mentally read and process that one more time. By psychologically knowing you can control the controllable to, in turn, make the controllable no longer controlled is one of life’s greatest difficulties to come to terms with. It ruins way too many relationships that are so simple to expose the true basis of at the core.
While I said I would focus more on the psychological lens, let me shift gears slightly back to the physical lens of spatial perception. When it comes to our relationship with others, it’s of as great importance to define physical boundaries as much as psychological boundaries, though they likely go hand in hand in most circumstances.
Forever relationships, those truly authentic ones that seem to stand the test of time through all the varying ebbs and flows, are cultivated as a result of allowing physical space and/or separation to enter the fold. Physical boundaries often times signal a hard line or end to something. I don’t know why they have to signal such a black and white message, but maybe that’s just yet another grey area we have to let go of and learn to accept.
Maybe, it all stems from the comfort of sticking to the norm. There is a weird pleasure in holding onto things we know we should relinquish for the satisfaction of knowing exactly what the outcome will be in the next moment. Certainty is a killer to letting go, but it’s the logical thing to crave.
That’s where it becomes an art.. knowing how to release the tension in the palm to allow it to open up and free up what is within. We all envy those who can somehow find a way to keep the palm open for longer periods of time. It’s all a practice and energy that takes a lifetime for most to develop.
I don’t even know how I want to close off this post. The idea of “closing the loop” or “closing the cycle” is often touted as a fundamental way of letting go. But maybe, just maybe, that is yet another way to keep the palm slightly tensed and ready to close back up into the fist. Psychologically, we are allowing the space to be created to bring back that entanglement we’ve been trying to free ourselves from.
It’s a self perpetuating idea in which you’re subconsciously convincing yourself you can let go by telling yourself that the loop or cycle will close. However, in reality, you’re just keeping control over finding the answer by keeping grasp of the idea in of itself. Possibly, the answer is just to detach from that idea. I don’t know - I’ll just let it be and find out.
Having said that, I think I’ll, as much as it feels unnatural, end the post here. No bow to tie it up with - just that soothing realization of:
Ahh, I forgot I could just do it another way…
“I suppose in the end, the whole of life becomes an act of letting go..” - Irrfan Khan
