On surrendering the need to fix, mend, or control—and embracing peace in presence.
A few months ago, I watched a sapling outside my study window, bent by the weight of an early monsoon storm. Its thin frame looked fragile, almost sure to snap. I found myself instinctively wanting to go out, to brace it with a stick, to do something.
But I didn’t. I simply watched.
The rain grew stronger. The winds howled louder. The sapling swayed, danced wildly, bowed to the gusts—and then, surprisingly, straightened again. It didn’t break. It didn’t resist. It moved with the storm, not against it.
And then the storm passed.
That image stayed with me. Because often, in our human lives, we feel compelled to rush in—fix the pain, clarify the confusion, control the outcome. We mistake urgency for agency, as if everything that aches must be resolved immediately.
But there is a deep, quiet power in letting things be.
We’ve been trained to equate peace with resolution. Closure. Certainty. But some things in life don’t ask to be solved—they ask to be witnessed.
To be allowed.
To be held gently without the pressure of transformation.
Emotional fatigue often comes not from the complexity of life, but from our unrelenting insistence that it should make sense on our timeline. That sadness must quickly give way to joy, that doubt should be answered with clarity, that grief must be productive.
But what if, like that sapling, we let ourselves bend without needing to break—or fix?
Letting be is not passivity.
It is presence.
It is saying: I am here with this feeling, this uncertainty, this moment.
And I do not need to wrestle it into something else.
Sometimes, what heals is not the solution, but the soft space of allowing.
If you are carrying something today—a question without an answer, a sadness that lingers, a fatigue that doesn’t yield to motivation—perhaps this is not the time to push.
Perhaps it is the time to pause.
To breathe.
To trust that some things, like rainstorms and seasons, pass on their own.
Letting be is not the end of the journey.
It is the clearing where strength gathers quietly.
Where the soul stretches, not with effort—but with ease.
So today, may you give yourself the radical permission to not fix, not force, not hurry.
May you let what is, simply be.
Because in that softness, something sacred returns.
Letters for the Inner Journey by Pushkar
Whisper back, if the letter spoke to you.