Is It Time to Let Go?

Sometimes life throws you a curve ball just when you need it.

Yesterday we sold our house. It wasn’t listed, we weren’t thinking about selling, in fact we were looking forward to enjoying all the renovations and updating we had worked so hard to complete over the last five years. Our home had new blood and never looked better—a half-acre of winding paths, mature trees offering shade on long-hot summers, trellis wrapped in Concord grapes all surrounding a rambling home originally built a century ago, back when land near a lake was cheap.

And now we don’t own it.

It just happened. In the middle of a depressed real estate market a young couple searching for a special home to raise their two-year old daughter found our little piece of paradise, fell in love and said ‘yes’.

It was a curve ball. 

I once read about how a joke works. It starts with a story or question that tricks your mind into predicting what comes next. “Where do pirates get their hooks?” the comedian asks. Answer: “Secondhand stores.”

The punch line is the curve ball that grabs your assumption, throws it out the window and hands you the new reality. That’s how today feels. The punch line for us is that we are now thinking how to say goodbye to a home of 25 years. Oh, and we need to find a place to live.

We also need to let go.

Hanging On

When I sold my shares in Adventure Network - the first commercial logistics company operating in Antarctica - I came home with a mountain of cold weather gear. Including a full arctic suit gifted to us by a sponsor. It was purple.

When you are piling on warm gear about to step on the ice in -30 nobody is thinking fashion—the thicker the layer the better, regardless of the colour of whatever you zipped up to keep the cold out. 

So, naturally I hauled my purple suit home, folded it up, and shoved it into a gear bag. From home to home and city to city, my purple suit was somewhere in a pile I vaguely remember was cold weather gear. 

For the last three decades I’ve lived in the Okanagan Valley, one of the warmest climates in Canada. We grow grapes and fruit and the long-cold winters have been replaced with a few skiffs of snow and two weeks of “chilly” temperatures. Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I might have been thinking that if we ever had a sudden polar vortex of cold weather, I would be the most prepared person in my neighbourhood.

Letting Go

One Spring not too many years ago, I was posting some gear for sale on Facebook Marketplace - one of the only good things to come out of social media. At the last minute, I remembered my purple arctic suit - it was now pushing 30 years old - and I listed it. To my utter amazement, it was one of the first things to sell. The young man who showed up at my door was gushing with enthusiasm and going on about plans for some mountain or Northern region - I really wasn’t paying attention, all I could think about was “OMG someone wants the purple suit!?”

"We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned,” writes Cheryl Strayed, “so as to have the life that is waiting for us." Hanging on to the familiar, like my purple suit and even our lovely home with its creaky floors and Kiwi vines and Japonica that House Sparrows and Nuthatch's play hide-a-go-seek in is safe and comfortable. But that’s not what life is about.

Life is about letting go and letting in what is waiting for you so that you can "live immediately" as Seneca wrote. The future is going to happen and what better way to greet it than unencumbered by the past, like an old arctic suit that’s purple.