What I’ve Learned About Letting Go

It’s summer! That’s significant to me because I live, at least for part of the year, in a part of Canada where we have about 8 weeks of real summer. That’s it…and that is sometimes an over-estimation.

People count each week, each weekend. They know that by the time August arrives that you’ll start to feel the morning frost of fall.

When I first moved to Abitibi (northwestern Quebec), a little over 20 years ago, I called this attitude scarcity weather – when you don’t believe that sun and heat are abundant and you are hyper-vigilant, scared it will leave.

You can’t take an afternoon nap when it’s sunny outside.

You have to do something outside on every day of summer because if you don’t, you’re wasting the sun.

After about 5 years, and my plants freezing when I planted them in May, rather than after the summer solstice, I realized that people were counting their summer weekends for a reason – and they needed to make sure that they used them, because summer would soon be gone.

I’m not dissing winter, which can be really beautiful…..but winter is really, really long and summer passes as quickly as a dream.

This summer, I’m back in Abitibi and we’ve got some big changes coming up, so we might not be back here next summer.

Since I’ve been back, this is what I’ve noticed.

Space.

There are wide open spaces here.

There is forest and uncultivated land.

The skies are big.

The crows and ravens are huge and loud.

The bugs are practically intolerable.

But the beauty of the space and the land and the sky takes my breathe away.

Here, we are close to the land and that’s the gift I’ve been given by living here.

I never thought I’d feel this love for this place. I raged at God for years about living here in a small northern town.

But I only got the keys to leave, when I fell in love with it.

That’s the crazy paradox of life.

You have to learn to love what you don’t want and only then, you can leave it behind.

Have an amazing summer.