Courtesy of JewishSacredAging.com

Transitions are a challenge. This is, of course, no great piece of earth-shattering news to any of us. At this stage, we have had to navigate several of them. This truth has been brought home to me again in vivid ways these past few months.

The organization I work for has had to cut 25% of our people, programs, and resources. I moved my mom into an assisted living facility (the jury is out on this one), my daughter is three weeks from giving birth, and I am trying to figure out how to negotiate all of this change and what it may mean for me. Different faces for different people at different times?

All of this by way of reinforcing a concept that as we grow older, the changes and transitions are more complex, involve more people, and, in some ways, involve more risk. Letting go of what we know, even if what we know is harmful, is always fraught with anxiety. Change is constant, and it raises many of our own anxieties. We do this dance of “holding on and letting go,” and the older we get, the more challenging the dance becomes.

An image drawn from a poem by Rabbi Harold Schulweis (in his book In God’s Mirror) speaks of this tension of holding on and letting go in the image of a trapeze artist at the circus. Flying through the air, holding on to the trapeze bar, the performer lets go and reaches for the second bar, having faith that the bar will be where it is supposed to be and that the change will take place safely. That moment of suspension, when the performer is holding on to nothing, is symbolic of so much of the changes we encounter. In a very real way, the only thing supporting that trapeze artist is faith: faith in himself and faith in the fact that the next bar will be where it should.

There is no class we can take in the art of letting go. We begin letting go from the moment we are born. As we grow up, the choices become more profound and the impact of those choices on us and others become more intense. None of us chooses alone. What we choose does impact others, and what others choose does impact us. The tension between holding on and letting go is a lifelong dance that each of us do without a script and, like that trapeze artist, often without a safety net. Yet, each of us must let go and move on, for that is the way of life.

Each of you who read this will have his or her own litany of stories on how you faced decisions on letting go. And this letting go is often for the good, for to stay mired in a relationship, system, or life that has lost its meaning and purpose is to court death of the soul. I asked a good friend and colleague, Rabbi Jake Jackofsky, to reflect on this the other day. He wrote some wise words:

This concept of holding on and letting go is a fascinating one and one that impacts each of us. I welcome your thoughts and your story. We’ll return to this subject.