What a YouTube Downpour and Rain-Drenched Cottage Taught Me About Life

When will we ever, ever truly learn to let go?

A little cottage. Rain dancing on a tin roof. Bursts of water shooting up from the grass like mini-fireworks.

As I listen to my favorite thunderstorm track on YouTube, I see this accompanying image.

And it’s whispering to me.

The seventy-year-old woman I spy behind that cottage door sees me standing in the virtual storm. She’s rocking in her wooden rocking chair and looking out the rain-drenched windows. She has her patchwork quilt laid over her legs, and she’s shaking her head in pity.

I can read her lips.

She’s saying, “I know why you’re staring at my little home. You want it, don’t you?”

“You want my little cottage with its scarred wooden floors and chipped kitchen counters. You want to take a bath in my clawfoot tub, put on your ugliest, coziest pajamas, and cuddle up in the knitted blanket on my couch. You want to sit by my fire and let the rolls and the acne and the bills and the jealousy and the ‘gotta have more’ go.”

Silence. She can see the answer on my face.

Her last words to me before she turns away?

“If my simple little life is what you want, then what the hell are you doing?”

What Are We Really After?

I’ve spent my whole life going after “the dream.”

Maybe you have too.

Buying things you think will make you feel worthy of other people’s attention. Working yourself sick to pay for home improvements only the people who already love you will ever see. Giving yourself over to fatigue, panic, and depression because your face, body, job, or life story isn’t what the world thinks it should be.

But deep down inside, you want the cottage too, don’t you?

You want peace and self-acceptance. You want to stop caring so damn much about things you know deep inside don’t matter.

You want to breathe.

Well then, my friend, maybe it’s time you learned.

Learning to Breathe

If you want that cottage, if you want a life of contentment and serenity, you’re going to have to let out the breath you’ve been holding in for decades.

You’re going to have to expel all the poison that’s been clogging up your lungs (not to mention your heart and spirit) for as long as you can remember.

Here’s how you start.

The Process

You start breathing the way you’ve always done.

In and out. In and out. In and out.

Now that next breath?

Hold it as long as you can.

Let it gather up all the world’s judgment and all the world’s pressures. Let it gather up all the self-hate and jealousy. Let it gather up all the bullies, heartbreaks, and self-imposed gunshot wounds.

And then.

Exhale.

Let go of the “you” you think you’re supposed to be, and love the you that you are.

Let go of the need to prove yourself to the world.

Let go of “you should look like this” and “you should have this” and “you should be this.”

Let go of the “what-ifs” and “what-thens.”

Let go of the worries you have no control over and the mistakes you could have avoided but didn’t.

Let go of the two thousand pound anchor that’s drowning you because you’re not a size six, a CEO, or a five-figure follower Instagram star.

And if you can manage to let go of these things, magical things will happen.

The world of burdens upon your shoulders will turn to feathers. The cages you’ve created for yourself will turn to butter. And that little old lady in the little old cottage will finally allow you entrance.

You’ll have the life you want to live (the lives all of us really want to live if we’re honest) in your grasp.

So set the tea brewing, light the fire, and pull your rocker close to the old lady. She’s a great storyteller.

And when she invites you to go out and “set a spell?”

Go.

Look out on the world. See all the things you gained by simply letting go.

And be immensely grateful you learned something people go their whole lives not knowing — that nothing matters more than loving who you are, where you’re at, and who you’re with.

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