The Season of Letting Go

Greetings from the season of letting go.

That seems to be the theme of this year, at least. Letting go of one life in order to make room for another, one with more potential. One with more room for growth.

And boy does it take time. I guess I should’ve known that dismantling 47 years of living… sifting through it, throwing the inessential away, and unpacking it, newly configured in new surroundings would require more than a quick call to the movers and a few boxes. This is going to be quite the undertaking, which is why I’ve set aside the entire year of 2026 for it.

So what brought me here? After years of hard work and emotional investment, why have I a reached a point where it must be tossed away? Why the need to pivot now?

I’ve hit the ceiling of the living situation that I’m in. The career I’ve built no longer sings to my heart. My surroundings are stifling, and lead nowhere. There is no avenue to grow in the ways my soul is begging me to grow. My passions are being unaddressed, and the country is in shambles.

It’s not just a dead end. It’s a series of them, stretching out into infinity. Even if I brute force myself through another brick wall, like Kool-Aid Man, there’s just another one right behind it.

Life is signaling to me that I need a major pivot. It’s making it obvious.

To some, the career-man lifestyle works. Do your job, climb the ladder, collect that pension, send the kids off to school, retire, die, and leave the rest to the next generation. There are quite a lot of people out there who are perfectly accepting, and who may find their peace in that. I’m not judging them, I’m just saying that it doesn’t do it for me.

Perhaps I’m just a dumb romantic fool, swayed by my own stupid emotions to abandon security and the logic of the middle-class, driven into the wildfire of unnecessary risk to follow the wild music of my own heart. But I can’t help it. I’ve hit a point where I’m just asking myself on a daily basis “is this really it?” and my conscience is screaming back at me “no, you idiot, there’s a whole world out there, full of new experiences that you’re keeping yourself tucked away from.”

And for what? The lure of another paycheck to spend on gas and Amazon? A pension that promises nothing more that a slow and comfortable coast to death?

Bro, I want to live. I’ve seen other parts of the world, and I want to get all up into that. Existing in a split-percentile sliver of existence for your entire life, and never venturing outside of that may work for many folks, but it is simply all wrong to me.

So maybe now you can begin to understand why this long, rolling path has spit me out into nowhere. Perhaps now you can see why I feel backed into a corner. Even if it doesn’t resonate with you, you can briefly step outside of your doorway to see why it may be a major problem to others. You may sleep soundly in the coddling arms of your 401K, but it just doesn’t bring me that same kind of peace. Where you see freedom, I see a cage.

Dramatic? Maybe. But back up a bit and really size up the reality of our collective human condition. We get this one life. And your purpose may be another man’s pain. You don’t get a do-over. You don’t have a reset button for the days you’ve lived.

So, wow, let me bring it back in. 2026 needs to be the season of letting go… for me. 47 years old, dude. It would be so easy to just roll the years into each other… 48, 49, 50(!) I’ll definitely do it next year. No I mean it.

Procrastination is Purgatory, and I can’t live another year in this no man’s land. I need trajectory. I need to spend at least a few of the good years left, basking (or struggling) in the life my soul is begging me to experience. With the days that I have left, I need to push the boundaries of my experience. I need that fullness, or else what I’ve been gifted with will be wasted, and I can’t go to my grave with that kind of failure.