Strength lies in letting go

Alan Mandell said: “You think you look strong because you can hold on, but strength lies in letting go!!”

There is a deep meaning hidden in that statement. Read it again and sit with it. It says plainly: don’t hold on, just let it go.

Do you know the real quality of forgiveness? DON’T LIVE IN REGRET.

What happened in the past was not in your hands. It was there to teach you a lesson for a lifetime.

If you start holding on to things, trust me, you will never be successful.

Holding on to things does exactly two things:

No. 1 - it frustrates you.

No. 2 - it affects only you.

No other person will repent. You will be the one affected, and you will be responsible for your own emotional, mental and physical disturbance.

The mistake everyone makes about forgiveness

Most people resist letting go because they think it means the other person gets away with it. That forgiveness is a gift you hand to someone who does not deserve one, and that holding on is at least a form of justice.

It is not. Here is the arithmetic, and it is brutal.

You are carrying a heavy thing around every day. Rehearsing the conversation in the shower. Losing an hour of sleep to it. Feeling your chest tighten when their name appears.

They are having lunch. They may not have thought about it in two years.

That is the entire situation. There is no scoreboard, no cosmic ledger where your suffering registers as their punishment. You are the only one paying, and you have been paying for a long time.

Letting go is not absolution for them. It is you finally putting the bill down.

But it is not one decision

I want to be honest about something the quote does not mention. Letting go is almost never a single moment where you decide and it is done.

It is more like the same decision, made repeatedly, over months. You put it down. It shows up again on a bad Tuesday. You put it down again. The gaps between get longer. One day you realise you have not picked it up in weeks and you cannot remember when you stopped.

That is what it actually looks like. So if you have “let go” of something three times already and it keeps returning, you have not failed at it. That is just the process, and it is slower and less cinematic than anyone admits.

As I said, just let go of the negative vibes.

Why get clingy with disturbing emotions? Why ruin your present holding on to the past, and let it spoil your future forever?

Remember: happiness is the secret to success. Not the other way around.

Welcome it with a smile

As I always say when sharing my thoughts: welcome every problem, every filthy comment, anything that harms you emotionally, physically or mentally - welcome it with a smile.

This won’t ruin you in any way. It will portray you as a smart person who understands a simple fact: arguing with fools is of no use.

And there is a quieter benefit. Every argument you decline is time you did not spend, energy you did not burn, and a version of yourself you did not have to become for twenty minutes. That adds up over a life.

Trust me. Try it once and start seeing the difference.

The question that helps

If you are struggling to let something go, the question I have found most useful is not how do I forgive them.

It is: what am I still hoping for?

Almost always there is something. An apology. An admission. For them to finally understand what they did. Some future moment where the record gets set straight.

That hope is the actual grip. Not the anger - the anger is just what the hope turns into while it waits.

And once you can name it, you can ask honestly whether it is ever going to arrive. Usually it isn’t. Grieving that specific thing is what finally lets the rest go.

-Kashish