Let it Go

One of my favorite little girls on earth loves to sit in the back seat or stand in the middle of the room holding an invisible karaoke microphone and belt out the refrain from the strangely popular movie Frozen, “Let it go, let it go / and I’ll rise like the break of dawn . . .” I find the song disturbing, though as a declaration of freedom from a young woman shedding the constraints of others’ expectations and the role of “good girl,” it makes visceral sense. I’ve been there. I’ve known a good many women who have been there—especially eldest daughters who take on more than their share of adult responsibility too soon. In the movie the eldest daughter declares herself free of fears that controlled her, free of rules, free of the past in a series of furious claims that, were this a human story, would have to be tempered by the compromises that adulthood requires.

There are times and seasons to look at what shackles us and let it go. Fears are a good place to begin. Fear of disapproval, fear of failure, fear of being left out, fear of pain and loss and death. Those fears often grow in the shade of familial politics or in hostile corners of the schoolyard where cliques and cruelty take hold like crabgrass and children learn to hide their vulnerabilities. Letting go of fears is really a lifetime project, as is caring for a garden: the weeds keep coming, even when we think we’ve gotten them out by the roots.

Letting go of rules is another long learning curve. Lawrence Kohlberg’s “stages of moral development” offer a useful way of tracing personal progress from a way of life based on obedience or punishment to more relational understandings of what we owe one another to the broadened perspective that enables us to think of ourselves as human beings on a common journey, sharing this fragile earth as our home. To let go of rules, or at least to assess them critically in terms of the deeper purposes they serve, is to accept the freedom and responsibility we have been granted as thinking, feeling beings called into living relationship with a living God. Once you shift the question from “What do I have to do?” to “Where does the Spirit seem to be leading?” or even “What do I want?” opens up an exhilarating range of possibilities and choices. I was 33 when I really heard the “What do you want?” question for the first time. I was pretty much a rule-follower until then. A good girl, for the most part. I had not learned to honor my own affinities, attractions, inclinations, desires, or hopes in the spirit of grateful, joyful freedom I now believe God calls us to. It’s not an easy question; it can be a scary one. What do I really, most deeply, most consistently want in my life leads to increasingly complex reflection on the tradeoffs we face when we get what we want. Along the way, someone is likely to remind us to “Be careful what you pray for—you might get it.” But it’s good to ask, and it’s good to let go of the rules in the same way it’s good to let go of the side of the pool if you want to learn to swim.

Letting go of whatever hinders us from pursuing our deepest, truest desires, the work we love, the leisure we need, the relationships that enlarge our hearts is a good thing. “A man is rich,” Thoreau writes, “in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” When we consider our possessions, commitments, and even relationships in terms of what they enhance and what they hinder, we might be surprised. And we might be liberated if, having done that inventory, we disencumbered, cut loose, and, now and then, belted out a few lines of “Let it Go.”