Elegant Noticing
My dear friend, after devoting heart and soul to a shared business vision that required years of high-level project management, attention, and major life adjustments, recently awoke to a decision from the investing partner that they had changed their mind. It wasn’t because of the quality of my friend’s work. In fact, their work far surpassed the scope of the original vision.
This investor’s decision was a complete, inexplicable 180-degree change from the enthusiastic partnership discussions that were happening even up to days before, even with the work continuously unfolding into a thing of miraculous beauty and service. Rug. Pulled. Out.
The investor offered full ownership at a price beyond their current means with an unrealistically tight turnaround time.
After conscious stillness within the vastness of sadness, my friend declined the offer and the temptation to scramble for salvaging their heart’s work with these words: “It held too much push energy and that felt unkind to my being.”
Wildly similar circumstances are happening in the lives of others I know. Some of that push energy is nestling its way into my life too, and I am able to share with them and remember for myself my friend’s example of allowing such personal radical grace. This, to me, isn’t the familiar concept of letting go or even walking away. The observation of unkindness to their being feels more like the mastery of elegantly noticing impermanence.
Imagine the form of your vision as a dandelion. We often forget or fear the impermanence of all form and its influence on our habits of control. When uninterrupted, this cycle causes systems of suffering and is what the Buddha described as clinging and grasping. Much of our lives are filled with habituated actions that resemble clinging to, grasping at, and gluing florets back onto dandelions long intended to disperse.
My friend didn’t lose their vision. The current form is simply being allowed to blow away. Is there sadness? Of course. It sweeps through their breathing with bittersweet astonishment and fear. But the acts of grace and elegant noticing neither dismiss their humanness nor resist the infinitude of possibility that now greets the next iteration of their vision. To try and cling, grasp, and glue those florets onto the impermanent agreement would be unkind to their being.
And it is unkind to yours and mine as well. By now, you can no longer count the number of times the instruction to “let it go” has been preached at you. But this consideration is not that. It isn’t offered to you as a way to get out of something because it feels too hard. All that does is perpetuate things continuing to appear insurmountable. It isn’t about clinging to any identity as the sufferer of loss. And it isn’t about abandoning the core of a vision, your dharma, your incarnated purpose. This release from clinging and grasping is the gift of elegant noticing - observing the impermanence of all form and ceasing the dualistic impulse to control the machinations of the outer world.
Your vision and purpose never die. The form will.
No one has the power to permanently be unkind to our being. Only we do.
Let us not confuse these.
I am in awe of the unfolding journey of my friend and grateful to them for being a consummate example of living the wisdom out loud.