Letting Go, Beginning Again, and Growing Up

Standing under the church breezeway, looking across the lawn at the not unusual 70 degree and sunny Palm Beach day, I told my friend, E., that I had offered unsolicited advice to one of our mutual acquaintances. Let go had been my suggestion to our friend.

“Oh, yah,” E. pronounced. “Oh, for sure, we have to let go before our things can arrive.”

Déjà vu is the phrase used when you feel like you’ve been in a place or situation before. I’m not sure of the phrase that applies the same concept to people. From the millisecond I met E., I felt like I’d known her before. Our times together are easy, which is a bit contrary to the reserved and detached demeanor that she conveys.  

With her wispy presence, one might also think she would be reluctant to offer a strong opinion. But one would be wrong with that notion; dead wrong. Her aloof bearing and sensual voice simply package her strength in a different wrap.     

One of the first charming quirks I noticed was how often she said “Yah...” Mouth open wide to an elongated O, she lingers on the A so long that I can hear her breath slipping around the edges of it.

“Yah…” The word carries no recognizable accent. She has lived in Paris and London, and grew up in New York, but her yahs were created and designed by her. Cosmopolitan in nature, they are the slow, soft drumroll that precede her hearty endorsements of an expressed opinion. While others might affirm their agreement with a “hmm” or a nonchalant “yes,” she often dawdles on that one long soft syllable, before whispering aloud her postscript. 

“Oh, yes, darling,” she emphasized, on the idea of letting go. “That’s just the way it is.”

And that was the end of our Sunday catch up. Putting the Gothic tower of our church behind us, Bothwell and I made our way to the car. We were headed to Sunday brunch.

He drove while I scanned my email.

At 12:29, the exact moment I had been speaking to E., I’d received an email that I had given up on receiving. I had asked someone to write a letter on my behalf, and the passage of time had left me with the silent message that they preferred not to do it. In, other words, I had let it go, made other mental plans, and was prepared to move on. 

E’s soft yah echoed close as I read the email aloud to Bothwell. I was gobsmacked by the precise collision of time. I couldn’t move on from my fluke conversation and my chance email. I wondered why some miracles happen in an apparent flash and other desires or prayers can drag on for years.  

That evening, we watched episode four of The New Look, a series inspired by true events, about Coco Chanel and other designers in Nazi-occupied Paris, during World War II. I was spellbound by the whole series. I’d worked a short time at Chanel, knew well the Wertheimer name (global private owners of the brand to this day), and adored seeing Ben Mendelsohn brilliantly play Christian Dior.

Spoiler alert for those who have not seen episode four:

The following few paragraphs describe yet another letting go.

Christian Dior’s sister, Catherine, has been captured and imprisoned for her participation in the French Resistance. They’ve taken her to the concentration camp Ravensbruck. Christian is grieving her absence and is obsessed with her return. His despair and hope swirl together in a nasty gyre that leaves him paralyzed. He becomes incapable of planning, or even envisioning the next stage of his own life because he feels Catherine will need him when she returns.

His life is defined by his waiting.

At long last, he’s told she has been located and that she will be arriving on a certain train. He goes to meet her at the station, but she never disembarks from the train.

“Many died on the way down,” the conductor murmurs when Christian approaches him. His white lilac bouquet drops listlessly to the floor as Christian realizes he has to give up hope of Catherine’s eventual return. He lets go.

Some time later, he schedules an appointment with the richest man in France, Marcel Boussac, known as The Cotton King. At that meeting he asks the mogul to fund a design house in his own name, Christian Dior.

The tycoon agrees to do it.

On his way home from that meeting, Christian stands on the banks of the Seine, removes a necklace and throws it into the dark water. 

The necklace was a token that a psychic pressed into his palm one evening, instructing him always to wear it. With the directive, she also promised that Catherine would stay alive as long as he continued to wear it.

With the toss of a trinket, Christian’s hope for Catherine’s return sails through the darkness and sinks into the even darker water.

As a viewer, I watched his dream fly through the night and die.

We can all relate to the quiet that settles in our stomach after that scene. A resolve, slightly warmer than 98.6 degrees, slowly makes it way down from our head, through the roadways of our heart and out the tips of our toes. Christian has moved on.

Haven’t we all—at certain moments?  

Upon his return to the apartment, that very night, Christian is met by his partner at the door.

“She is here, Christian. She is right through the bedroom door. Catherine is home.”

“Letting go, yet again,” I moaned to Bothwell.

“Why do we have to let go before our desires show up? Why do you think it is that way?” I sighed to my husband.

All day Monday the riddle pestered me. Monday night in bed, I counted other letting-go episodes, but unlike monotonous sheep hovering above me, the scenarios only agitated me more.

I remembered my friend who had wanted and wanted her own child. After years of trying to conceive a child with no success, she adopted a baby girl, only to become pregnant a few months later. 

One of my relatives came to mind. The couple had been told that the wife could probably not have children. After years of hoping and praying the professionals were wrong, the couple finally gave up and planned the hysterectomy they had delayed so long. It was scheduled shortly after her 40^th birthday. However, the surgery never occurred because she became pregnant in the meantime. A few months later she delivered their only child.

I’ve had times in my life when I wanted things so much, it hurt. When I was younger, my mother had a terrible car accident. Four months later, she had to have very risky brain surgery. The doctors told us she might die. I prayed all night, I prayed aloud and I prayed silently. I wept and I wailed. I could not imagine life without my mother.

My mother made it through the surgery and lived a decade and a half more. I have always referred to her survival as my miracle gift. Letting go was not a prerequisite.

But it seems that all my other deep desires required some sort of trade-in. Perhaps God thought the wish wouldn’t fit. Or perhaps my heart was so hard and tense the blessing got bounced back. Or maybe, like Christian, there was another call—like starting a couture house—that I was meant to answer.

I think quite a lot about pieces and puzzles and parts, and what gets put where and when.

I had an eager friend who swore she could put together the inexpensive barbecue set I’d bought for the summer house in Connecticut. I was actually impressed by the speed with which she completed the task.

But as we stood there admiring her work, I noticed several additional pieces off to the side.

“What are those?”

She was startled by my question and I was concerned that she was startled. I had thought she would tell me they were extra parts I could throw away, but I quickly realized she did not recall that they even existed. 

After closer inspection, she informed me she thought they were parts that stabilized the standing posture of the barbecue.

Some screw had been put in before or in place of a bolt. About eight pieces were missing and the sequence of insertion was wrong for others. The deadline for completion had been achieved, only to be drastically delayed, while the breakdown and reassembly were finished.

Could that be the why behind a few of the letting go’s? Something else has to be shined, polished or fixed or begun before we are ready for the big shiny desire to be delivered?

I think so. To begin again makes space for those talents we are destined to show the universe. Catherine returns to Christian, but she does not become his whole life. My projects may have needed one last, magic tweak that I could have never imagined before I started over or found a new path. The answer most often is not found in real time. It’s revealed to us later, usually when we are ready to see it.   

And then there are regrets. They stick like leeches, refusing to be released. Let go is a lyrical sound compared to the stubborn tentacles of regrets. How do we nudge those stones loose and let them go?   

As I wrote my memoir, I was startled to see connections that I’d never pieced together before. If not that, then not that either.

Without my too-young marriage, I would not have met the people who introduced me to my life’s career in beauty.

I had carried that premature marriage regret for decades. But the light from those two crossed wires helped me understand other past grievances or regrets.

The same light guides me now.

When new regrets lodge themselves into some of the cracks left by the dissolved ones, I know I can’t hurry them out. They showed up for a reason, and I must provide the light and scrutiny they deserve. Really, I coddle them a while. And, when I am finished, I celebrate the linkage that goes with the tale.

And when no correlation exists, I remember that Nietzsche wrestled with it, too. If not that regret, there would have been another and whose life would that have been? Certainly, not mine as I have lived it right now.

But those regrets also serve a purpose. When they are properly pampered and understood, they hang out, right there beside us, reminding us not to attract similar ones.

Ever stepped in the same hole twice? That’s our nature. Better to walk around our frailties, than break our foot twice in the same damn dip.    

I believe I am still a work in progress, a WIP, as we call it in business.

That concept delights me.

I feel young and alive when I sidle up to growing. Even better, I like to think I’m still growing up. It makes me move. It makes me listen and it gives me freedom to play with the live wires that make sense of life.

I wish growing up was a science, with formulas that add to all the right sums. But it’s not. It’s art, it’s poetry, it’s music, it’s love and it’s magic. It’s backwards and forwards and dance steps to the side.

And I have believed for a long, long time that Diana Vreeland, former editor of Vogue, had it right all along.

“I do not know when I will die, but when I do, I will be very young.”   

Keep growing till the last breath has been taken.

The Master Sculptor will let us know when we are all grown up, and the WIP is complete.