Getting A Grip
When you’re learning to strum a guitar, one of the first things you have to figure out is how to hold a flatpick. If you hold it too tightly, it gets caught on the strings, your wrist is too rigid, and the music comes out stiff and halting. The trick is to hold the pick as gently as you can while still drawing the sound you want from the instrument. The grip you use depends on the song you’re playing, and the way you want it to feel.
Knowing how tightly to hold onto things is useful even if you aren’t playing Smoke on the Water at 2am in your underwear (he said, purely hypothetically). Unfortunately, our instinct about how to hold things is often wrong.
The past is one thing we sometimes hold too tightly. Our brains grab onto some past misfortune--a misspoken word, a foolish mistake, a personal failure or loss--and we hang on with a death grip. When we grip the past that way, squeezing it and examining it from every angle, some part of us imagines we can change it, but of course we never can. What we really need to do is let go.
The future poses a different problem. Sometimes we can change the future, or at least prepare for it, so we don’t want to let go completely. But the future is slippery, and hard to hang onto. If we grip it too tightly, it pops out of our grasp like a wet bar of soap. We make ourselves anxious about misfortunes that never arrive, or disappointed by hopes and wishes that never come true. It serves us better to hold the future lightly, with an open hand. We don’t get to possess or control it, or even fully see it. All we have is a glimpse, and then it shifts right before our eyes.
The biggest downside to reliving a past we can’t change, or preparing obsessively for a future we can’t predict, is that it keeps us from taking hold of the present. And since the present is the only place where we have full agency in our lives, it’s probably what we most want to embrace.
Embracing the present is different than grasping or clutching at it. No matter how delightful a moment is, we can’t hold onto it forever, no matter how tight our grip is. Nor can we eliminate the bad moments by strangling them and pushing them away--that just prolongs a struggle that we’re bound to lose. To embrace the present is to hold it with care and attention and self-compassion. It’s to take in every moment--good, bad or indifferent--and get what you can from it before it passes, as it always does.
