Learning to let go

This is a recollection from Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being

"He suddenly recalled the famous myth from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another.

Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

Let us suppose that such it the case, that somewhere in the world each of us has a partner who one formed part of our body. Tomas's other part is the young woman he dreamed about. The trouble is, man does not find the other part of himself. Instead, he is sent Tereza in a bulrush basket. But what happens if he nevertheless later meets the one who was meant for him, the other part of himself? Whom is he to prefer? The woman from the bulrush basket or the woman from Plato's myth?"

We have all heard the story of the hunter and the monkey. To hunt the monkey, the hunter leaves a sturdy tin jar of cookies fixated firmly on the floor. The monkey on-seeing the food reaches his hand in and grabs a handful of these cookies. However when his hand forms the shape of a fist, he is unable to remove his hand from the tin jar. Unwilling to let go even upon seeing the hunter approaching, the monkey is later shot to death.

Sometimes we've just got to let go to move on in life and to let go of the things that are important to us. Often we are too focused on a single important object that we miss out on the other half of ourselves from Plato's Myth.