Letting Go
Over the summer, I received an invitation to my high school reunion. For a moment, I was 16 again. I could see the faces, hear the voices, even smell the gym floor where we once gathered for dances and games. These were the people I shared everything with—secret parties, first heartbreaks, the terrifying questions of who we were becoming. At that age, they were my whole world.
Until they weren’t.
They are strangers now. I might walk past them in a grocery store and never recognize them. They might stand beside me in an airport and I would feel no flicker of familiarity. The closeness we once had evaporated silently, not with a fight or betrayal, but with time.
It isn’t only high school friends. I think of colleagues I once shared offices with, teammates I sweated and celebrated with, people whose weddings I stood in. Once central figures in my story. Now, ghosts in photographs. All people I no longer know.
We talk about holding relationships together as though it were simple. But it is one of the hardest things we will ever attempt. People change. Circumstances shift. We move, we marry, we parent, we chase careers. To keep a relationship alive requires more than affection. It requires maintenance: time, attention, forgiveness, curiosity. Even then, sometimes it frays anyway.
And it isn’t only people. We struggle to let go of jobs that no longer fit us, of habits that keep us small and caged in, of beliefs that once steadied us but now restrict our thinking and empathy. Each feels like loss because each carries a story of who we once were. To set them down feels like betrayal. But often, it is the only way to move forward.
Still, we resist. Not because we are weak, but because our brain is built for resistance. It craves predictability, the safety of the status quo. Change asks it to work harder, learn new patterns, rearrange connections, delete what it already knows. So it whispers: Don’t imagine better. Don’t let go. Stay here where things are familiar.
And the brain doesn’t stop there. It makes letting go feel painful on purpose. It floods us with the warmth of nostalgia to keep us attached, and it punishes us with discomfort when we try to release what we know. Both are tactics designed to protect its patterns. Nostalgia convinces us the past was golden. Pain warns us not to break away. Together, they keep us from imagining anything different.
And the deck is stacked in its favor. The brain is built more for memory than imagination. Entire regions of it are devoted to storing and retrieving what has already happened, while far fewer are tasked with creating what has never been. Memory is the safe bet, the reliable tool for survival. Imagination, by contrast, asks the brain to gamble—to picture something untested, uncertain, and new.
But here is the hope. Every time we fight that battle, every time we release what no longer serves us, we create space for something better than memory can picture. The future will not be what we once had. It will be different. And in that difference, there is room for joy, for love, for possibility we cannot yet imagine.
Because life shouldn't be a museum of the things we’ve kept.
It should be a workshop for the things we are brave enough to build.