Slacker.
I have this beautiful necklace.
I forget about it a lot, because it’s longer and delicate and has a gold chain and I’m more of a leather string and silver girl, but it really is quite pretty and feminine and has a way of making me feel the same when I do wear it. So the other day, when I wore a cute little brown dress with a pair of rockin’ cowboy boots, I thought about that necklace. It didn’t look quite right being so long, so I wrapped it twice around my neck to shorten it and it looked…well…it looked perfect.
I took it off later that evening with no problems, no tangles. I wore it again two days later, in the same way, and forgot about it until I was sinking into the bathtub. I tried to take it off the same way I had before, but no dice. It was tangled. Every so often along the chain are clumps of tiny turquoise and light blue beads that dangle down a little bit, and those dangly parts had wrapped around in a way that I couldn’t see how to fix. And with the necklace being so short due to my wrapping, I was having a really tough time. If I tugged a little, it seemed to only tighten the tangle.
Crap, I thought.
Actually, I thought worse words than that.
I started to panic. No matter how gentle I was or which way I tried to unwrap that stupid-no-longer-beautiful necklace, the more frustrated I became. Here I had had this stupid-not-beautiful necklace for like, five years and only worn it about like, five times, and now that I really liked it I was going to have to break it to get it off of my stupid neck!
Fine, I thought.
Here goes, I said.
And I let it go slack and gave a hearty tug.
It untangled.
It didn’t break.
I had been pulling it so tightly trying to see where the tangle was, not knowing that it just needed a little slack to fall away and be free, that I almost broke the thing trying to “fix” it.
And isn’t that interesting…
We are stronger than we think. And…sometimes we need to let go to discover that.
Don’t we try to force things a lot of the time? Don’t we think things like, “I know best” and “I’m in control” when really we just need to let go a little bit, have some faith, and let ourselves fall into what awaits us in the slack?
I think back to when my husband and I rock climbed every weekend. He would tie a slack line between the back of his truck and a tree, and we would take turns walking back and forth on the webbing or rope and try silly tricks as we felt brave. The only way to successfully walk on that line was if it had slack.
A friend of mine, an acupuncturist, said the big muscly guys tend to have to bigger problems with needles when they come in for treatment because they tense their skin and the needles get a little stuck. When they relax, she can treat them better.
When I get a little tired during a CrossFit WOD and stop thinking so tightly about everything and go into workout mode instead, the movements finally become more fluid.
Your body knows how to move if you just, well, cut the crap and let go a little. Just like that beautiful-not-stupid necklace.
Ha. Falling. Failing. Balancing. It’s all part of it.
