I’ve been an audiophile since my earliest memories.  The joy of rifling through my parents’ record collection kept me entertained for hours upon hours (remind me WHY kids need digital media, please?), listening to the same song over and over at great volume until every note, every word, was burned into my brain and onto my heart (something I admittedly still do to this day), and driving my parents nuts.  So much so that they eventually caved and bought me a pair of headphones to plug into our stereo.  I think it may not have been as great a blessing as they first thought it would be, as they could do nothing to stop the loud singing – now there just wasn’t music to drown it out. 

Relegated to the basement, finally, where they could at least dampen the noise, I would lie on the floor coloring, legs crossed in the air behind me, and listening to “my” music as loud as was permitted, letting it course through my body and shake my bones.  Only my brother shared my deep love of music but we had quite different tastes and so, often, we found ourselves wrestling (quite literally) for who got control in any given moment.  Thankfully I could negotiate a trade of TV hour time (which we each received a couple of times a week for a favorite show) for stereo time.  This always satisfied him, as he was much more into the TV than I was.  Besides Mutual of Omaha and Nova, there wasn’t much of interest to me on the TV.  Music and books ruled my world.

When I was somewhere between 7 and 8 years old, I found my parents’ stash of 45’s and had my first introduction to The Beatles, by way of the song “Let it Be.”  There was something about this song that my soul deeply connected to; it felt like hope and sorrow and beauty, and an emotion for which I didn’t yet have a name, but now know to be called “melancholy,” all mixed together.  I pulled into my personal code the phrase, “Let it be,” which, to my little girl mind, held the wisdom of simply leaving something alone to do its own thing – words I heard often from my mom as I leapt to capture yet another insect for my nifty Bug Jug, “Let it be, Carrie Ann!  She probably has a family at home and you are taking her from it.” 

In hindsight, as I reflect upon it, that was most assuredly more about the fact that she really hated bugs and didn’t want any more inside if she could prevent it, than out of any real concern for my little friends.  However, she knew the empath I was (though there was no such common word for it back then) and knew how to strike at the core of me.  Just thinking about how devastated the insect’s imagined babies would be pierced my tender little heart, quite often moving me to uncontrollable tears of great sorrow, and I would do just that… Let it Be.  I learned to observe more than interfere with nature, and, if I just couldn’t help myself, to always make sure to return them shortly to the same places I found them so that they could find their way home to their families.  I was a quirky child. 😉

As with most music from different epochs of my life, there came a time when “Let it Be” was replaced with new melodies and words that reflected the various emotional events of my life, helping me give expression to emotions when I didn’t have the understanding to articulate them myself.  These songs, which carried me through my formative years and are still embedded deep in my psyche, have often resurfaced throughout my life, and each time an interesting phenomenon occurs.  It will first trigger a flood of memory, and with it, the emotion or events that underpinned the resonance I had with the song at that time in my life.  Then it enters as something new, bringing new wisdom and experience, and sometimes greater understanding, to the lyrics. 

I won’t lie – there are definitely songs that served my girlhood mightily but no longer find resonance with this incarnation of Me.   With some I even find myself cringing and saying out loud, “Good Lord, what in the *world* was I going through?!” while quietly vowing to never share with anyone that I ever felt connection to it in any way, shape or form.  But on the whole, I think I’ve had pretty excellent music tastes my entire life. 

When this song resurfaced again in my life recently, in new form, the process of revisiting it was no different; remembering the first time I fell in love with its sweet melancholy, the emotions connected with that song of my girlhood, and those words, transporting me to the basement of my childhood home.

And then there is the Now – this moment – when I bring to this song the wisdom I have gained in the 45 or so years between that time and this; when I can appreciate the depth of the words as if they are new, letting them imprint a different meaning on my heart.  And as I let the song into my psyche in a new way, I began to hear those words, “Let it Be” from that new understanding and perspective.  And I began to muse over how that phrase can have different meanings, depending on the context.

Let it be… leave it alone.  On a deeper level, it is the wisdom to let something sit for a bit before acting.  When we are overcome with strong emotion, often our first impulse is to react.  When we let something sit for a while, we are often able to step back and see things from a truer perspective – one not colored through our emotional lens – and that deeper reflection will usually look much different than our first, impulsive one.  I don’t know many people who have not reacted out of emotion, only to come back later with regret, wishing they had handled the situation differently at the time. 

In an age when communication is instantaneous, we don’t have the enforced space of limited access to one another to just let things sit.  Too often, with the advent of constant connectivity in our world, we have the ability to let someone know just exactly what we are thinking or feeling immediately, and far too often our emotional impulses override our sense, leaving those we love with the hurt of words that we can’t erase, or we make decisions in the heat of the moment that can’t be undone.  In a society that falls prey to the whims of instant gratification, nothing satisfies more than being able to say exactly what we feel, the moment we feel it.

I don’t know when it was that I first learned not to make decisions in emotion, but that lesson has served me well over the years.  Life has taught me through much trial and a lot of error that things so often look differently once the storm of emotion has passed.  While I am still guilty of sometimes saying things that I wish I would have said differently, more gently – if I had only given it the space to sit – I fall prey to the temptation to react in emotion much less than I used to. 

For myself, if the emotion is intense, I find it helpful to sit down and let it out, either in my journal or by simply creating a text in my notes letting it all fly (NOT in the text thread where it can accidentally be sent… lesson learned on that one…), with a vow to let it sit until the emotion ebbs and I can revisit it from a calmer space.  Usually, those raw words never see the light of day and I’m almost always grateful that I did not let my emotions get the better of me.  This exercise also lets me see clearly how my emotions effect the way I see things in the moment and gives me the ability to work through the triggers that it illuminates for me.  The next time you find yourself sitting in the middle of heartache, anger, fear, or any other intense emotion, I challenge you to Let it Be and come back to it when the emotion has ebbed.   Just learning this one skill can save you and those you love a lot of unnecessary pain.

Let it BE… acceptance of what is.  To let something be as it is, knowing that it is all exactly as it needs to be in that moment and that it WILL be okay, means accepting the Now in all of its facets – the lightness and the darkness of it.  So much of our suffering comes, not from the situation itself, but from our resistance to it.  Truly accepting where you are in the moment – the IS-ness of it – is to let go of holding onto what you wish things to be or how you think things should be.  When we are in situations and only see all the ways we desperately want them to be different, we are fighting against what is. That is resistance, and until we learn this lesson, it causes every single one of us living this human experience a great deal of pain.  Letting go and letting it be as it is allows us to move through the moment of Now with greater peace and grace. 

I was handed the gift of this lesson by my two sons when they were very young, during one of the most difficult periods of my life.   Raising young children, largely alone, is challenging in the best of times.  I was handed the task of raising 3 of some of the most spirited children I’ve known.  My sons – one of whom was born a violent, angry little soul for no apparent reason (which he *did* grow out of, thank God), and one who spoke a language I had not yet deciphered (he was later diagnosed with autism and other intellectual disabilities) – pushed me to the edges of my sanity more days than not, forcing me to exhaust every parenting trick I had ever come across (and some quite unorthodox solutions I came up with all by myself).  There was rarely a night that I didn’t cry myself to sleep, regretting all of the things that I had handled poorly and wishing only to have their father there to give me a little space to step back when the frustration was too overwhelming so that I could do the only thing that had ever mattered to me in life – be the kind of mother for my kids that my mother was for me.   But he worked out of state throughout the week and I stayed at home, raising our kids alone without support or reprieve, until the weekends came and I could receive a little help.

I remember the day clearly, as it was a particularly difficult day.  It was late afternoon and winter, the sun pouring an amber honey through the huge windows of the South face of our home.  I was folding laundry, watching the dust dance lazily in the light, with tears streaming down my face, having failed yet again to handle something the way I knew I could have if only things were as they should be.  I was on my knees spiritually, my sanity holding on by a thread, and I remember turning my eyes to the sky and silently asking the Universe why I couldn’t just have “normal” kids – I could do this job so much better if only I had a break, if only their dad could be home more, if only they could be easier, if only…

And it was in that moment, as I slowly shook out a sheet and began folding it, with my heart breaking from yet another failure – another thing that I had handled poorly – that the Universe answered my supplication.  It came in the form of a realization as I remembered, from a life largely spent in the water, the lesson of a riptide.  

When one is caught in a riptide there is little hope of getting out of it – you are going from point A to point B regardless of whether you want to or not.  You can kick and scream against the reality of it and exhaust yourself in the process, or you can simply let go of resistance and flow with it.  Either way you are going from point A to point B; it’s just a matter of how you choose do it – exhaust yourself and quite possibly drown, or flow as gracefully as you can, accepting that it simply IS.  And I realized that this was a metaphor for my situation.  I was caught in a riptide and I was fighting it tooth and nail.  My kids were who they were, my partner’s situation was what it was, and it was my lack of acceptance that was making things so much harder than they needed to be; there was simply no sense spending the time and energy fighting what WAS.   It wouldn’t change anything, and it was making me more miserable than I had to be.

When I realized that – when I saw with such clarity that I was fighting what WAS and how that was making my job even harder – a tremendous weight lifted from my heart and a peace settled in me that I hadn’t felt in a very long time.  It was the peace that comes with the acceptance of what is; of simply Letting it BE.  It gave me the gift of being able to look at my sons and find acceptance with who they WERE, instead of constantly wishing they could be otherwise.  Sitting here now, writing this, I realize that that lesson was not only a gift to me, but it was a tremendous gift to them as well – that I learned to be in complete acceptance of who they were, warts and all.  Luckily they were young enough that at least they ultimately didn’t wind up on the therapist’s couch because they had a mother who couldn’t love them as they were (they may have for other things, but not THAT anyway).  

Once you see a truth you cannot unsee it, though you might go back to sleep for a while until something smacks your eyes open again and reminds you to Let Go and Let it BE (and I’m here to tell you that I got smacked a LOT throughout the years).  From that moment, every time that things started to get really heavy in my life again I would step back and realize that I was in resistance to the flow of life again and, again, I would reset, let go and let it BE.  It is so simple once you see it – once you feel the truth of it – but can be so incredibly difficult to do sometimes. 

At first there were constant resets, a constant forgetting and being smacked awake when things got really difficult.  But as time went on I realized that I didn’t have to reset for quite so long, and my periods of going back to sleep were further and further apart, until the practice of letting go just became something I would do automatically the moment I felt any resistance in my spirit come up.  It is a skill, and like most skills, it requires practice to gain mastery. 

For those particularly hard times when my Ego simply wants to sit and wallow in it all (because that’s the nature of the Ego – sometimes it just DEMANDS to have its pity-party and throw its tantrum), I’ve learned from 20 years of struggling against letting her have any voice at all, to give her permission to have her little fit of resistance until I decide that it’s time for her to pull up her big-girl panties and accept what is.  In doing this, I have to learned to give grace to myself – to give myself permission to feel all of my feelings and honor them without allowing them to control the narrative.  The difference is that I know I’m in control of the whole thing, not my Ego.

Let it Be… a commandment to the Universe to manifest a desired outcome into existence. 

“And when the broken hearted people living in the world agree
There will be an answer, let it be
For though they may be parted, there is still a chance that they will see
There will be an answer, let it be”

– The Beatles

And so it shall be. 

“Whisper words of wisdom…                                               

Let it Be.”