Are human beings the only animals aware of time passing? Do cats know they’re getting old? Do fish ever wish they’d swum in this direction instead of that one? Is a tree concerned at all with the number of years it has stood rooted in one spot?

When we were children, most of us had occasion to hear those words, “When you’re older …” We were told that someday we would be able to drive a car, or go on a date, or leave home. Patience was required, tested by anticipation and desire. We waited because we had to, and each time we reached that milestone, that magical “older,” and we got our driver’s license, or we went on a first date, we looked ahead to the next thing we could experience when the time came.

Mark McNease

Oftentimes the hardest part of letting go is simply not knowing what will take the place of the thing, person or situation we’ve allowed ourselves to relinquish. We may think the difficulty is in living without it, but upon closer inspection we discover that the real problem, and the impulse it creates to hang on, is being unaware what could possibly replace it. Comfort comes in many forms, including the illusion of certainty. Our routines, habits, assumptions, and repetitive thoughts all provide comfort—despite how uncomfortable we tell ourselves they make us! They offer reassurance that today will be as predictable as yesterday, and tomorrow will bring more of the same. Sameness is mistaken for safety. It allows us to be less fearful of what comes next.

Knowing that I have kept my life cluttered with the same things I want to be free from requires introspection that makes changing hard. I don’t want to admit these things bring order to my days. I may claim to be unhappy or displeased with my weight, or my behaviors, or my worldview, or my addictions, but they have provided me with continuity. I’ve trusted myself to wake up in the same dream since I was a child being told that dreams were beyond me, that I was limited and destined to achieve little in this world. Whose definition of achievement was another matter, and my resistance to that judgement, that taking measure of me, is among the reasons I survived. I wanted to see what could become of me, what experiences awaited in a new day, and I wanted to prove the assumptions wrong. Ultimately, the voices that tell us we are limited, and that play a part in our refusal to let go of the ordinary, become our own voices, the unwelcome narrator in our minds.