Quitting is something akin to failure in the traditional sense, it seems, but letting go of something that is no longer serving you makes good sense to me. “Never say die” applies to the old school determination of plowing through, slogging through the tough stuff day by day and I get that. I’m certainly not advocating throwing your responsibilities into the wind and giving up prematurely, before you have done what you could to uphold your end of the bargain. But oftentimes, I see something other than that going on in myself and in those around me. I see an almost idiotic attachment to the idea of the struggle itself, to the idea of never giving up, as if killing yourself in the process is somehow required to be a good person.
I have had a tendency to hang on to what is making me struggle long beyond what normal, common-sensical folks would call reasonable…and from there it is a slippery slope into the unreasonable. A reasonable business-minded individual would have declared bankruptcy about 10 minutes after their doors shut in 2008 – it took me over a year and a half to call “uncle.” Maybe I was worried that I would look the failure I already felt I was. Maybe I was worried that I hadn’t tried everything. Maybe I just had no framework to offer a bankruptcy – no family history, no business mentorship, no emotional way to figure out what that would mean when I was too new to it. Whatever the reason, my delaying the inevitable has caused my family more grief, my marriage more stress, my body more abuse (surely that 450 calorie soy chai latte will eventually make it all better…) than ever needed to be caused. Give it up already!
If I had just one New Year’s resolution brewing, I feel it is this one…one that I still just working out in my own crazy “keep-trying-to-make-it-better brain: Let go of what isn’t working and just see things for what they are, not what you want them to be or what you are trying to get them to be. Keep investing instead in what IS working, what is naturally working without forcing it to work. Okay, 2010….here I come, ready or not!
