Zephyr Cove, Lake Tahoe.
If you were asked to pick up a heavy weight and hold it as long as you could, you’d likely tighten your grip, grit your teeth, close your eyes and lift. And I believe you’d be able to hold it for a while. But regardless of your strength, you’d eventually begin to fatigue, and even though you undoubtedly held on as long as you could, in the end your only option would be to drop the weight back down to the ground. At which point you could just go about your day, leaving the weight behind.
But we don’t have that luxury with emotional weight. With emotional weight, there is rarely a “drop the weight and leave it behind” moment. We tend to carry that weight with us everywhere we go—every interaction, every relationship and every job; even when our muscles are straining, legs wobbling, sweat dripping, feeling like we can’t hold it a second longer—we somehow do. We continue to carry the weight because we never learned how to drop it. In a way, dropping it wasn’t even an option.
The most tragic part is that the burdens we continue to carry are taking up a whole lot of space that something better could occupy instead. Meaning we’re not only carrying the bad, but we’re simultaneously pushing away the good.
I don’t pretend to know the solution. I’ve been made to believe that any combination of therapy, religion, exercise, meditation, journaling, psychedelics and hiking the PCT could do the trick. But I suspect that the first step is recognizing that a weight is, in fact, being carried. Followed by believing that this weight can be dropped. And finally learning the techniques to effectively do so.
Recognize. Believe. Learn.
So I’ll ask: what weight are you tired of carrying? Do you believe it’s within your power to leave it behind? If so, what needs to be learned in order to overcome this burden?
Pull that thread and see where it leads.
“Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.”
-Helen Keller
