The One Skill: How Mastering the Art of Letting Go Will Change Your Life

The root of all of our problems is our inability to let go. I gleaned this idea from a book on Zen Buddhism one day a few years ago, and it struck me in its simplicity. Could it be true?

Consider this idea: a bird in flight. The bird lives totally in the moment, completely focused on its flight, perhaps using its sharp eyes to search for food.

It doesn’t start thinking, ‘Why does it have to be so cold here? What do the other birds think of me? What am I going to do when I meet up with the other birds later? Will I be successful at nest building? Why can’t I have bigger breasts? Why can’t I wake up earlier like the other birds?’ And so on.

Of course, as humans we have bigger brains than the bird, and we can solve problems and create poetry and build skyscrapers. So we have lots more ability and lots more going on than the simple bird floating on the wind.

These bigger brains, though, cause us all the problems that we have. I don’t mean the problems with poverty and disease, but the problems with overthinking things, feeling anxiety and frustration and depression and anger over the things that happen to us and might happen to us and have already happened to us but that we can’t stop thinking about.

It’s hard to overstate the case for the skill of letting go. And the resistance most people feel to the idea of letting go is just as great. Start to see how letting go becomes an incredible skill that can make you better at dealing with all of life’s problems.

And letting go is a skill that can be practiced. It’s not easy, but it can be learned in a practice of just 5 minutes a day. Amazingly, this short 5-minute daily practice, as easy as it might seem, adds up to great things.

In this concise book, we’ll look at how letting go works with many types of problems, and how we can develop and practice the skill of letting go.