TR 684 - On the Lesson of Letting Go

Life is interesting.

Before I begin, I’d like to apologize to the friends, family, and long-time subscribers who have so faithfully encouraged, supported, and followed along with me on this four-year learning journey. Facts being what they are, life has not allowed adequate time for me to crank out proper daily reports, and for that I’m sorry.

This is something that I’ve been struggling with.

Whereas in the past, I was able to spend four to six hours a day reading and researching, then writing and recording, that is a luxury I no longer have.

It is what it is, and I’m sure many in the audience can relate.

When I was a younger man, I used to wish there were 30 hours in a day and 10 days in a week—operating on the false assumption that if that were the case, I should be able to accomplish at least half the projects I had on my plate. The wiser perspective came slow, and it came in the form of a question.

True or false: there is always enough time?

The answer, no matter how I wrangled with it, was invariably true. There is only time and what we make of it. Wishing for more time was a splendid waste of mental and emotional energy that inevitably generated stress and ate at my ability to function.

Next came the lesson of letting go, and that has proven to be the most difficult lesson of all. Letting go comes in many forms, and it is widely applicable to everything in life, from the big and monumental changes to the little things that clutter up daily living.

This time last year, I was working in radio as a news director for five local stations. I’d also been running an hour-long weekend show for over a year at that point. One memory I recall, with fondness, was recording the Torch Report Weekend Review in my car at a pull-out alongside the highway in central Washington, before zipping back to the arena to watch my daughter compete in an equestrian event.

My days were long, with morning news hitting the wire by 5 a.m. and the many meetings that I was assigned to cover often going to 9 p.m. This schedule ultimately proved to be incompatible with raising a family, and I knew I had to let go.

To top it off, I was getting paid a paltry $2,000 a month for the effort, which was a far cry from a living wage. I’d originally justified this as a sort of initiation, a putting in my time, proving my commitment, and showcasing my talent, with the expectation that sowing these seeds would yield a fun and fruitful career in radio.

In reality, looking back on the experience, I was grossly under paid and way over-worked. It wasn’t meant to be. I had to let go and move on—and that was sad.

People in the local area had come to appreciate hearing my voice. Everyone said I did a great job and they missed the show. In other words, I was letting people down by letting go of radio, but in my heart I still knew it was the best thing for my family.

I was grateful for the experience, the taste of radio, and I may still pursue this path once the nest is empty. As fate would have it, freeing up my schedule allowed for more time and experience in the political arena. I was honored to be elected as a state and national delegate, and I got to make several trips to Washington DC to bump elbows and engage with panels of politically ambitious movers and shakers.

For the record, I am not a politically ambitious mover and shaker.

I had very reluctantly stepped into the political arena, not seeking status or an office for myself, but to better understand the process and how the system worked. I sought to learn how local uproar might be pushed through to political impact. At that point I had attended hundreds of meetings, via news reporting, at the city and county level, and even a handful of national meetings I was invited to attend.

Through all of this, my eyes were opened to the vast complexity of problems that beset us.