Let
Go

There is a teacher many of us have encountered without realizing it. He does not announce himself. He just pulls out in front of you, drives ten miles below the speed limit, and waits.

Michael Singer (aka Mickey), author of The Untethered Soul and a huge inspiration for the Tanisms, uses the driver in front of you as his go-to example of where the practice of letting go actually begins. Not with the big things. Not with the career pivot or the fractured relationship or the loss that takes your breath away. With the driver. The one who cannot hear you. The one who will never know you exist. The one who, when you do the cost-benefit analysis, turns out to be zero benefit either way.

That is the question worth sitting with.

The Energy Math Nobody Does

Think about the last time a driver genuinely got under your skin. How long did the frustration last after the moment passed? Five minutes? Twenty? Did you recount the story to someone else, effectively reliving it — and costing yourself another round of the same energy?

Now think about road rage. The extreme version. The person white-knuckling the wheel, yelling at a windshield, weaving through traffic to make a point to someone who has already forgotten they exist. What did it change? What did it solve? The other driver moved on. The only person still inside the reaction is the one who couldn't let go.

That sentence, once it lands, has a way of quietly dismantling a lot of other things too.

Why We Start Small

Mickey's point — and it is a good one — is that letting go is a practice. Like any practice, you build capacity through repetition. You do not start with the heaviest weight in the gym. You do not begin the meditation retreat with a ten-day silent sit. You start where you are, with what is in front of you.

The driver is perfect precisely because the stakes are low. Nothing important is actually on the line. Which means the only thing being tested is whether you can notice the reaction arising — feel it, name it, and consciously choose not to feed it.

If you cannot do it with the driver in front of you, how do you expect to do it with bigger triggers?

That is not a criticism. It is an invitation. Start there. Build the muscle. The bigger releases become possible only because the smaller ones happened first.

Letting Go on I-95

A few years ago I drove from New York to Alachua. I left at 4:30 in the morning — deliberately, strategically — because I wanted to be home by 8:30 that evening. I had done the math. I had the plan.

At 5:30 am, somewhere on I-95, I came to a complete stop.

Not a slowdown. A stop. Cars ahead as far as I could see. People getting out of their vehicles. The kind of stillness that tells you immediately — this is not moving anytime soon.

My habituated self got to work immediately. I got up so early specifically to avoid this. I planned for this. If I had just left five minutes earlier... That last one is the cruelest version — the almost. The five minutes. The idea that a slightly different decision would have placed me just past whatever had happened up ahead.

But here is what I knew, even as the narrative was spinning up: there had been an accident. Less than a mile away. It had just happened. And somewhere in that realization was something worth paying attention to.

I took a breath. I looked around. And I made a decision — not a dramatic one, just a quiet internal one — to stop spending energy on something I could not change and that was not mine to carry.

The road was closed for two hours. I watched the sun come up over the highway. I caught up on some emails, then turned on Ted Lasso on my phone. It struck a gratitude chord in me — I was able to watch TV sitting on I-95; just twenty years ago, I would have been stuck on that highway completely bored. Gratitude ran even deeper when I reminded myself that I was lucky I hadn't left three minutes earlier — I could have been the accident.

The Practice Is the Point

LET GO is not a one-time event. It is not something you achieve and then possess. It is something you do — repeatedly, imperfectly, in ordinary moments that do not feel like practice but are.

The driver. The delay. The reservation at the restaurant that was lost. The plan that changed. The outcome that didn't materialize. These are not interruptions to peace. They are the curriculum.

Start with the small ones. Let them go. Notice what becomes available in the space where the reaction used to be.

The bigger things will follow.