Everyone out there say ‘let go’ and you drop into lap of peace and happiness. More than everyone quarrel night and day with ‘what if’ they let go. This ‘what if’ is an ugly hook that they find difficult to let go off. If only they could get past this ‘what if’, they could sail through ‘let go’. ‘Let go’ appears to be a scary free fall with nothing to break it!

In this little piece, we revolve our talks around this ‘what if’ that holds back the mightier of the mightiest from sailing through ‘let go’. Why can’t they get round or through this nagging ‘what if’!

A discourse on ‘let go’ is as easy as biting the butter but when it comes to take the ‘let go’ plunge, it is as scary as throwing oneself off the cliff, lot harder than biting a bullet. For more than many, it fills with dread at the thought of letting go, for they think dying could be easier than letting go, willingly, in complete consciousness.  ‘Dying’ and ‘letting go’ have something in common. Both go the same way. One returns retaining the form and transforming the content (of consciousness). The other is transformed both in the form and the content.

Back to the point, why is this theory of ‘let go’ is so tricky, beyond control, no power to bend it, so scary, so frightening, to put into practice! And why is this nagging ‘what if’ hang over one like the sword of Damocles even when one gets the road clear for the ‘let go’!

Let us take a close look at what this ‘what if’ is!

‘What if’ may mean or represent different things to different people depending on their schooling that went to shape the way they think and behave. There may be no two opinions about it that every one of us live in the prison of our own mind and we just can’t knock a hole in it to escape it. Those few who have transcended the boundary of their mind and gone mindless will probably give a mocking smile on it. Those of us who don’t get tired of talking and talking and talking are the damned prisoners. And yet, there is the difference. Some enjoy the ‘freedom’ of prison! Others suffer the ‘pain’ of it depending on how the prisoners take it!

Now, back to ‘what if’, ask a psychologist and he’d call it ‘anxiety’. Go to a spiritualist and he’d call it ‘attachment’. Talk to a logician and he’d call it ‘logic’. Listen to a philosopher and he’d call it an ‘assumption’. Go to a religious Guru and he’d call it ‘fear and desire’. So many other people describe ‘what if’ in varied ways, much in the same way the English say there’s are more than one ways to skin a cat. But getting down to skinning the cat is a tricky thing, isn’t so?

No matter what concept, notion, or idea they attach to ‘what if’, to me, it is nothing but simply a thought and a safe and cozy world one lives in built around thoughts or founded on thoughts. Simply a thought, but only too complex to be simple, no! This thought is unimaginably smarter than any camera humans have made this far. It can take as many pictures at a time as fishes in the pond. Images taken by human made cameras may go fuzzy and blurry with time, images taken by a thought as kid is etched so deeply in memory that the older they get the more vivid they become. Thoughts have power to turn the images into a living reality for the thinker, to magnify the images larger than the mountains, and to make the images into a world wherein the thinker willingly live like a prisoner all his life.  With a thought working in such a complex and baffling ways to an infinite magnitude, is it possible to let go of it at one go! Perhaps, not!

Say for example, if someone (familiar or unfamiliar) says a hurtful word (playfully or seriously), we can’t just leave it then and there and walk off it retaining our usual self. There’s an onslaught of so many nasty things playing us up! The peace of mind is affected. The order in the head is upset. Nerves in the brain get strained or tense. Normal functioning of mind thrown into disarray. Slightly at the outset and then digging deeper into it. So many the whys and the wherefores come into play, making a mad rush into memory and churning out thoughts over thoughts endlessly.  It rankles with us for hours, and days, even weeks until we feel our head going to burst open any moment and then forced to find ways to offset it. And then, all we do is that we switch over from this excruciatingly painful thought to some pleasant thought that we bring back in memory, or switch from a negative one to a positive one. Again, knowingly or unwittingly, we’re playing into the hand of a thought. This is how we palliate our misery and manage to bring back our cool, just like monkeys swinging away in a tree from branches to branches, breaking their fall. We too, grab another branch when the previous one is only too frail to hold our weight thus leaving one and grabbing the other and the other and the other. We don’t let go of the branch without getting a grip on the other coz there is ‘what if’.

Now, those of us who can’t let go one bad word or a bad event even if that means inflicting untold pain and misery upon us, is it possible for us by any means to let go of the whole world we have painted with the color of our thoughts in which we live in!

When it gets too much and we can’t carry it too far, or we come to a dead-end, we let go of terrible memories, not by choice but by threat coz we have exhausted all other ways, and there’s nothing else for it but to let go. Nothing works! We let go or take aid of drug to do it, or crack up!

So, this ‘what if’ which stand on our way like a juggernaut is nothing but just a thought. A thought, out and out, and nothing else. Harbor one thought in head or one million thoughts, it is the same coz one thought has the virility to produce one million thoughts in a matter of seconds. Everything we live, experience, own, win or lose are mere thoughts or else there’s empty nothing. We’ve lived in the prison of our thoughts without ever realizing it and thus living through the seesaw of pleasure and pain. This ‘What if’ is the last post erected on the border between infinitude of freedom and walls of prison. Once we get past this ‘what if’, the land of freedom stretches off into the infinity. It is only a matter of thought. It is the thought that has condemned us into prison of our mind for all eternity. Let go ‘what if’ and enjoy the free fall into the lap of peace and happiness!