Letting Go

Continuing with my smiley faces theme, recently my family had a get together over the weekend.  This was a rare opportunity to see all of my family in one place as we are now based in different locations.  In my first post I talked about releasing control on a weekend trip and learned the benefits of letting go.  As I watched my nieces and nephews playing I realised that I could learn a few things from them too.  As babies when they were learning to walk, if they fell down they just got back up and tried again until they were successful, they didn't feel disappointed with themselves because they didn't get it right the first time.  As older kids now they live in the present moment, they don't hold on to past mistakes or worry about the future.  If they fall and hurt themselves, they cry, work through the pain and five minutes later it's as if it had never happened.  They forgive easily and don't hold grudges. They release their emotions as and when they arrive. I've noticed that as adults this seems to change, we replay things in our minds, wondering if we should have done things differently. Attempts become mistakes and self judgement kicks in.

During the family weekend we took the kids to the park and my youngest niece made a sand angel, on which she then drew... a smiley face!  Was this coincidence or the world trying to tell me something?  Am I over thinking this?  Maybe, and maybe that's another lesson to learn.  Sometimes things don't go as we planned and sometimes we make mistakes, but the trick is to look at it differently, as an 'attempt' we learn from then let it go instead of carrying it around for fear of making the same mistake again.  As I was driving the other day the song 'Wake Me Up' by Avicii came on the radio and for the first time I listened to the lyrics "I tried carrying the weight of the world, but I only have two hands" and it made me think.  Apparently Thomas Edison invented the light bulb on his 1000th attempt and was quoted as saying "I have not failed 1000 times, I have successfully found 1000 ways that will not work."

As if by some other coincidence, I have a day to view calendar on my desk at work, and each day has a quote.  Last week one of the quotes was "some mistakes are too much fun to only make once."  It is important to learn from them, but it's just as important, if not more, to then let it go.

The sand angel smiley face

Inspiration for this post came from a few articles I have read on the Tiny Buddha website:
http://tinybuddha.com/blog/use-self-acceptance-to-learn-from-the-past-and-let-it-go/
http://tinybuddha.com/blog/be-more-childlike-life-can-be-beautiful/