You Were Never Actually Holding It
A guy went past me on a scooter yesterday while I was out on my walk. He nearly hit Jay’s dog, then nearly hit someone stepping out just in front of me. I shouted after him. I was properly angry. At lunchtime, I was still thinking about it.
The near miss, and how little he seemed to care, infuriated me. By lunchtime I was still turning it over, and then I realised: it wasn’t the near miss, or him, or his actions I was holding onto. It was my ego. So this morning I built my ritual around figuring out what’s actually mine to carry, and what isn’t.
A Ritual for Letting Go of What You Can’t Control
It started with yesterday. I chose not to let anything sit with me longer than it needed to. Here’s what that actually looked like on the page this morning.
The quote and the metaphor are what actually reframed it for me. I’m responsible for what I hold onto, not for how someone else chooses to ride a scooter. Uncurling a clenched fist is exactly what yesterday’s anger felt like once I looked at it properly: gripping something that was never really mine to hold.
The tips are the practical part: the actual things I can do today so I don’t end up carrying tomorrow’s version of the same thing.
This exact structure, intention, thoughts, feelings, actions, beliefs, a quote, a metaphor, and a couple of tips, is what’s sitting on every daily page of the Jay’s Dad Journal. The pages are left blank on purpose. You fill them in your own way; today’s version above is just one example of what that can look like.
If you want to try letting go of what you can’t control for yourself, the questions above are enough to start with a blank page. If you’d rather it was already laid out for you, that’s exactly what the Jay’s Dad Journal is for.
And if you come back to it tonight: what did you let go of today, because of you? What are you still holding on to, and is that alright? The Journal has a Reflections section built in for exactly that, if you want somewhere to put the answer.
If today’s questions stirred something, the Journal gives you a place to keep coming back to them.