Resilience: Letting Go with Trust
As you may know, I am the foster mom for a beautiful young man who has lived with us for over two years now. This week we hit a milestone that most parents come to much earlier in their parenting: he slept over at a friend’s house. It’s a perfectly normal and even desirable thing to happen; he is 20 years old, after all, and has a whole world of friends who love him. It is actually amazing that until now he has preferred to sleep at home. But in this age of COVID-19 and the reality of racism, my heart tightens every time he leaves the apartment, praying that he will be kept safe from the plague and violence that lurk outside, not to mention from the normal young male blindness to risk. I am learning about letting go. I am learning about trust.
Trust is difficult. It’s difficult in this world even in good times, let alone in circumstances like ours. And yet trust, or being able to see the potential for inherent goodness in and around us, is a strong element of resilience. We are like children learning how to ice-skate, with bruised knees, clinging to the side of the rink, yearning to let go and be able to fly along the ice.
I look for everyday experiences that remind me that I can in fact trust, that I do live trustingly, even when I forget that is what I am doing. The siddur, the prayer book, points me in a few directions. The evening prayer, Maariv Aravim, describes God as ordering the patterns of day and night, sun and stars, months and years, with a regularity I can have faith in. My windows look west out across the Hudson River to the New Jersey Palisades. I have been watching the sun set further and further north up the Palisades as we approached the summer solstice last week and now it will begin its journey back towards the south. I can rely on that beauty and orderliness even in the midst of chaos.
At the end of the day, we might recite Adon Olam before going to sleep. The last part of it says that I entrust my life, body and soul, to God as I sleep. And indeed, when I close my eyes and let sleep rise up through my limbs, I trust that I will wake up in the morning and that sleep will renew my strength for a new day.
With every exhale, I let go, releasing the effort of bringing vital air into my lungs. I trust that the next breath will be waiting for me.
It is a practice to pay attention to the moments of simple trust in my life. These moments are important because they help me see a bigger truth. I, like you, have experienced fear, betrayal and hurt. Some of us experience these things so grievously it is difficult to imagine ever deciding to trust again. But I also experience moments of trusting the stability that I know I can rely on. I might even call it inherent goodness.
It’s possible that if I had a choice, I might not ever want to learn to let go. But I don’t have that choice. Our kid is growing up; he will go out into the world. I hope he will always thrive. I know there is no guarantee. I will have to let go of other loved ones and one day I will let go of this life. I want to do that secure in my knowledge of that goodness. Each time it is time to let go, I want to do so with trust.