Personal Story | Lessons

Forgive Quickly, Love Deeply: The Power of Letting Go to Make Room for Happiness

Sometimes we just can’t let go of pain, but we gotta try or it’ll eat us up

Janice Eastman
4 min readMar 15
A tin man in an open field.
Photo by Dylan Hunter on Unsplash

My oldest child loved eating ice when he was around 2 years old. Ice was his best friend — he would eat it all day long.

One time his hand became cramped from holding the ice. But he refused to let it go.

He began to cry.

I told him to let go of the ice, and he refused. And the more he held on to the ice, the more he cried.

His 2-year-old brain couldn’t let go of the ice, and he expected it to continue supplying him with the joy of eating ice. Despite the discomfort, it caused him.

Duh, let the ice go!

For many of us, it’s that simple.

For others, it’s a difficult task. It’s difficult to give up on what we enjoy. It’s difficult to step out of our comfort zone. It difficult to walk away.

Continuing to hold on to things that no longer serve us, whether physical or emotional, can hurt us, just as my child was hurt by his love of ice.

Learning to let go is a powerful tool for our happiness and well-being; it allows us to shed any unnecessary stressors preventing us from thoroughly enjoying life.

Whether it is a material item or a negative emotion, detaching ourselves is the first step toward our own personal growth and happiness.

Ultimately, it’s about giving ourselves the gift of freedom.

The power of letting go to make room for happiness is not just by discarding physical objects but also by breaking free of negative emotions and limiting beliefs.

Here are some reasons to practice letting go:

1) An emotional mess

Continuing to hold onto things that no longer serve us is like carrying unnecessary emotional baggage everywhere we go, making everything and everyone else grind to a screeching halt.

Once my son found the necessity to let the ice go that was causing him pain, he could return…

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Janice Eastman

From reading my writing, I hope you will begin to break down self-imposed barriers and find your authentic self in the extraordinary story of life.