Let it go

“When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible; when he dies, he is hard and insensitive.

When a tree grows, it’s tender and pliant, but when it’s dry and complex, it dies.

Hardness and strength are death’s companions.

Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being.”

—From Stalker

The idea of “letting go” often feels like an imperative, a demand to conform to society’s concept of maturity and growth. To grow up, one must abandon childhood’s wonder and embrace adulthood’s rigidity. What was once considered a virtue—the capacity for wonder—becomes a liability, dismissed as immaturity or torpor.

Most people regain fragments of their lost wonder through their children, experiencing it again vicariously while continuing the march toward “maturity.” But for those who resist this transition through the art or by their will, who can’t let go of their wonder, life becomes a tussle—a delicate balancing act between gawking and growing into the adult expected by the world.

In my mid-thirties, I find myself suspended in this liminal space. Life has slowed, like a ship that has set sail but remains close enough to the shore that its outline is still visible. The initial bustle of departure has settled, and I feel the rhythmic oscillation of waves beneath my feet. Yet there is a constant sense of longing—a haunting presence, like the emptiness of a chair recently vacated, still bearing the shape of someone no longer there.

Now infused with the weight of experience and time, this wonder transforms into melancholy. It is no longer the light curiosity of youth but a more profound yearning for connection, for meaning. It resides in the space between the child who just left and the adult who has not yet arrived—a space where letting go feels unbearable. 

This work explores this tension—the struggle to hold onto pliancy and wonder amidst the inevitable pull of hardness and rigidity. It is a meditation on the invisible, the oscillation of life’s waves, and the longing that lingers beneath the surface. 

All I see is water below, endless and vast.

One has to give up his wonder or better to say, grow up according to his age, to be par with the expectations of the society, in corresponding to the norms of that age (not on your own, but according to the world’s idea of “growing up”), else, what was considered as a virtue till some time back, would be considered as  torpor from now on. Usually, people revive their lost wonder by the children they have borne, hence they can experience the same for some more time and still can be matured by their own, but only for some more time. If someone isn’t going to obey this transition, then he will have to tussle with the life to keep the wonder with him. Anyway, childhood and youth will get wane anyway. Then the quality of wonder remains like a toy without a player, yet we can’t consider it as just another household thing. It slowly permeates with the experience accumulated by age and eventually turns into a state of melancholy. The tussle between the child, which is not yet dead yet the father who is not yet born starts from here.

At mid-thirties suddenly I feel the pace of life slowed down a lot. As if the ship has started to sail yet the shore is still nearby, but am surrounded by nothing but water under my feet. After the initial bustle of starting a journey has settled down, now started to feel the oscillation of the waves. There’s a constant sense of longing at every corner of the thoughts as if to look at the chair where till some time back someone was sitting and now bears something invisible.

Everybody says to let it go, I see nothing but water underneath.