My truck was broken into last week as I ate dinner with a friend.  I’d just returned from a business trip, so I had a lot of stuff with me: favorite clothing, my computer, headphones etc.      While I am angry that someone felt the need to do something like this, it’s the loss of one particular item that I cannot let go of: my iPod.

My iPod was tragic.  It was a second generation model that I have had easily for almost 8 years or so, battered, slightly malfunctioning and filled with the music that I adore.  I have staunchly avoiding upgrading each time something better comes out.  I want to stick with what I know works.  Yes, it has been on the fritz, but it is mine.  Each song represents a memory, a time in my life that I cannot recover, just as I cannot rebuild that music catalogue as it was on that machine.  It was set up in a certain way.  I knew its quirks.  It was safe, dependable, loved and all mine.  It was my past and present.  It is not my future though.

Losing something is never easy.  You spend time looking back, looking around and looking at the loss.  You weren’t ready for it, weren’t prepared.  But that doesn’t mean it’s not the right time to let go… to move on.

Things are just that: things.  They are possessions that ultimately possess you, if you let them.  They can hold you back with a tune that is familiar, safe and beloved.  But a thing is just a thing after all.  It has no emotions.  Rather, it acts as a mirror, reflecting back at you only that which you allow it to.  The same goes for life.  Life, career, today… it can be safe, loved and a good place to be.  Or it could be holding you back as well.  Are you leading your own life today, or are you allowing “things” to possess you – to keep you from moving forward, moving up or moving on?

Letting go is hard.  I miss my iPod.  I am angry.  I am sad that it’s gone, and have to face the fact that it will never be again. I am moving through my emotions – moving on.  There will be another iPod, another opportunity to create new memories and new magic.  I will build the next play list of my life.  While the old one feels like it is gone too soon, perhaps instead it is gone at the perfect time.  Someone else will love that iPod and fill it with their songs and their memories.  They will make it new again, just as I make mine new again.

Someone told me once that “you are a slave to what you own.”  Possessions… these things.   They shall not possess me anymore.

Today, what is holding you back?  What will hold you down no more?