If you’ve read virtually any spiritual writing, you’re well familiar with the mantra “let go of the outcome.” And yet there are (many) times when even detaching from the outcome of what you’re cooking for dinner can feel like a Sisyphean task.
Why is this so hard?
I believe letting go can feel so excruciating for the same reason that it can feel so hard to forgive, to be vulnerable, to speak our truth, to love ourself, and pretty much everything else that will satisfy us on a deep soul level: fear.
Our ego is deeply afraid of letting go.
When we don’t acknowledge this fear, we approach letting go just like we do so many other things in our lives: something we know we “should” be doing but we really don’t want to.
Why are we so damn afraid?
For most of my life, I viewed uncertainty as the bogeyman. I was taught that not knowing is unsafe, and I felt this lack of safety in my body, mind, and emotions. In order to feel safe, I had to know everything–past, present, and future–and I had to use this information to control my circumstances. Piece of cake, right?
Needless to say, this created a constant state of stress, of feeling like I was never enough, that I needed to prepare more, control more, learn more, do more, be more.
And the other side of this never-enough coin was, paradoxically, a feeling of false superiority. In my driven pursuit for perfection, I would look at others as being less ambitious, less hard working–just less.
But in order to maintain my so-called more-than status, I could never stop. I believe this is a product, in large part, of internalized capitalism. You are only as good as what you are able to produce. If you can’t produce, you’re worth-less and need to get out of the way to make room for someone who can.
But digging even deeper, this is a state of fear–fear of never being enough and of “bad” things happening the moment you can no longer stave them off.
We’re All Culturally Confused
This fear of never being enough ties into another product of our culture, this weird split that generates massive amounts of anxiety.
On the one hand, we’re taught from a very young age to be “reasonable,” to approach things logically and to discount our feelings (“feelings aren’t facts”), and to get our head out of the clouds.
On the other hand, we have a cultural obsession with celebrities and wealthy people, with rags-to-riches stories, and of being “discovered” and being catapulted into a larger life overnight.
This dichotomy leaves us torn between being incredibly measured and even pessimistic in our expectations to this almost delirious giddiness over what might be possible. In short, we have a really conflicted relationship with desire. We want to believe that amazing things can happen, yet we feel almost foolish admitting to such an “unreasonable” desire.
And because most of us don’t acknowledge that this tug-of-war stems from an internalized cultural belief, we assume it’s a result of some personal deficiency on our part. If only we we could do more, buy more, and be more then we wouldn’t feel torn this way. We’d have it all figured out. And this fuels the fear of unworthiness even more.
In this context, it’s easy to see why detaching from outcome is like telling an addict to “just lay off the crack a bit.” It’s not that simple.
Or is it?
Is there a way to take fear out of the equation, to quell our impulse to try and know and control everything?
I think there is, and it’s all about trust.
Stuck with the Consolation Prize
Over the past year, I really started to explore my relationship to control and my fear of uncertainty. I looked back over journal entries and compared times when I was scared of what might happen with what actually came to pass.
And I noticed something really interesting.
Time and time again, outcomes exceeded my expectations. And when I journaled about letting go and surrendering my need to control everything, they exceeded my expectations even more.
I realized that, when left to my own planning and forecasting, I often saw the future through a very limited, fear-filtered lens. In short, I was willing to settle for the consolation prize, but the Universe wants to give me so much more. My job is to receive those gifts with gratitude, not orchestrate each and every detail of the process.
I mean, let’s face it: Even if you approach things from a “purely” logical standpoint, it’s clear that as one person you cannot possibly organize events more effectively than the intelligence of the entire Universe.
I was really struck by a quote by scientist David E. Kaplan in the documentary Particle Fever. The movie chronicles the nail-biting wind up to the first experiments with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) with physicists weighing in on the potential significance of what they might discover once the collider is up and running.
Dr. Kaplan is giving a talk before the first experiment, which was years and a ton of money in the making, and an economist calls out from the audience, “What is the financial gain of running an experiment like this and the discoveries we will make in this experiment?”
Dr. Kaplan replies:
It’s a very, very simple answer: I have no idea. We have no idea. When radio waves were discovered, they weren’t called radio waves because there were no radios. They were discovered as some sort of radiation. Basic science for big breakthroughs needs to occur at a level where you are not asking, ‘What is the economic gain,’ you are asking, ‘What do we not know and where can we make progress?’ So what is the LHC good for? Could be nothing other than understanding everything.
And here is where letting go of the outcome can shift from being something we “should” do to something that is incredibly fun and liberating, because we are no longer trapped by our limited human conception of what is possible.
Too often, we assume that our small, fearful expectation of the outcome is the best we can hope for, and then we subconsciously go about making sure that’s the case by blocking support and gifts and by sticking with our habits and patterns that keep us mired in the past.
But the entire Universe is flowing forward. We don’t have to create that flow; it’s already there, whether we feel in tune with it or not. There is so much momentum, so much energy available. We don’t have to do this on our own. We can tap into that flow and receive all of that energy and momentum, all of the gifts and support, anytime we like.
How? By trusting that it exists.
When we commit to trusting that the Universe has our back, we shift everything.
We are open to seeing things in new ways, seeing possibilities where before there were only dead ends.
Seeing support where before there were never-ending to-do lists.
Seeing love where before there was only fear.
And with the Universe in your corner, it’s so much easier (and more fun) to gently let…go…of the outcome.
