Happy Sunday, Darlings,

I am writing to you from Paris.

My old city, the city of love. The city I spent more than twenty years of my life in.

And because apparently the universe has a sense of humour, I am also here to see the one and only Céline Dion.

Céline has accompanied my entire romantic education since Titanic, I think. The love, the heartbreak, the hope. All the good stuff, 😉

So there is something rather fitting about sitting here in Paris writing this particular Sunday Session.

Because I have been here, but I have also been somewhere else the past few months. Busy solving a mystery. A jigsaw, really, where, if I could just find the one missing piece, the whole picture would finally make sense.

Today is the day I put it away.

You see, I was properly knocked out in love recently. Total KO.

And somehow, even then, I was still trying to make sense of it. Maybe if I understood a little more. Explained myself a little better. Shared what I was feeling differently. Gave it more time. Tried one more way of reaching across.

Some part of me was convinced that if I stayed in that boxing ring long enough, eventually the punches might turn into câlins, as we say in French. Hugs.

And then came a final few blows and finally something in me went, Okay. Thank you, universe. I see it now.

Merci beaucoup.

Pheff.

Resilience or resistance?

I think part of the reason it took me so long is that resilience is a very big part of how I operate. Some of the best things in our lives require us to stay when it would be easier to leave, to tolerate discomfort, to try again, to believe in something before there is proof that it will work.

But I think I have been mixing resilience with resistance, because they can look very similar from the inside.

Both can feel like fighting for something. Both can require enormous strength. Both can involve refusing to give up. But resilience helps us move through something difficult, while resistance can keep us fighting what is actually being shown to us.

Which is quite hopeless considering that here at Mabel we are currently teaching the Path of Less Resistance.

And apparently I needed the lesson.

Because in the end, the universe was not exactly whispering; it was practically screaming at me to get out, while I was still asking whether it could, perhaps, provide just a little more clarification. (Jesus)

Letting go of the story

Eventually, I stopped fighting.

And what surprised me most was the relief. Not because everything suddenly felt good or because what had happened stopped hurting. The relief came from no longer spending so much energy trying to make reality fit a story I desperately wanted to be true.

And God, we can become attached to those stories.

We don’t only see what is happening. We see what we believe it means. We add intention, potential, history, hope. We remember the beautiful parts and use them to explain the painful ones. We take what could happen and allow it to compete with what is happening, until the story becomes so convincing that even when reality starts contradicting it, we somehow keep editing reality instead of editing the story.

There are things we can understand intellectually long before we are ready to live according to what we know. Someone standing outside our situation can see it perfectly clearly because they don’t have our hope, our history, our attachment or our imagined future sitting on top of it. They are looking at what is happening. We are looking at what is happening plus everything we wanted it to become.

Learning to trust my own intuition

And there is an uncomfortable part of this I have had to look at too.

Nobody was forcing yours truly to stay in that boxing ring.

I think I owe myself an apology for not trusting my own intuition when something in me already knew. For asking myself to endure a little more when perhaps the kinder thing would have been to take my own hand and walk out.

And I don’t say that to beat myself up. Quite the opposite. There is something strangely freeing about taking responsibility for our own part without also taking responsibility for everything.

Because knowing something and being finished with something are not always the same thing.

Sometimes we still want something, just not as it is. We can see its potential, but if that potential depends on someone else wanting to create it with us, we cannot build it alone, and eventually, we have to live with what is actually there.

There is an important difference between giving up because something is hard and letting go because we have finally accepted what something is.

Surrender is accepting what reality and people’s actions are showing us.

And this is not just about love

We do it with jobs we have outgrown. Friendships that stopped feeling good a long time ago. Businesses we keep pouring ourselves into because we cannot bear what closing them would mean. Versions of ourselves we continue trying to become because once upon a time we decided that was who we were supposed to be.

And then, once we finally see something clearly, we can be unbelievably cruel about how long it took.

How did I not see this? Why did I stay? Why did I keep trying?

But maybe sometimes we simply need to stay until we are done.

And when we are done, perhaps part of the work is looking back at ourselves with enough honesty to say: I should have protected you better. I should have trusted you. I should have listened to you sooner. I am sorry.

I owe myself that apology

But I also owe myself something else now.

To stop.

Because at some point, thinking about something stops giving us new information. We are simply walking the same ground again and again, while our actual life is happening somewhere else.

And quite frankly, I am starting to piss myself off.

The thinking, the analysing, the replaying. The enormous amount of energy spent trying to find the missing piece that would finally make the whole thing make sense.

Enough.

Because while I have been doing all of that, I have also been standing in a bizarre waiting room to my own life.

And I don’t want to do that anymore.

Making space for what comes next

There is something else on the other side of accepting what is actually there: space.

Space for something else to happen. Space for something better to come into our lives. Space we simply cannot have while we are pouring all our energy into analysing what has already happened.

So this Sunday Session is not only a reflection. It is an over and out from me.

I have thought about this enough, analysed it enough, replayed it enough.

I have been standing in the waiting room of my own life, staring at one door because I was so convinced it was my door that I barely noticed anything else around me.

And maybe I was simply knocking on the wrong door.

There is an entire life on the other side of this, there are people I haven’t met yet. Things I haven’t built yet. Places I haven’t been, love I haven’t experienced. There is so much I cannot possibly know from where I am standing now.

And I want to leave space for it.

So this is the last Sunday I am giving to the jigsaw.

I don’t need the missing piece anymore.

I walked out the door.

Mush love,
Pernille