“Well you only need the light when it’s burning low

Only miss the sun when it starts to snow

Only know you love her when you let her go

 

Only know you’ve been high when you’re feeling low

Only hate the road when you’re missing home

Only know you love her when you let her go

And you let her go”
Lyrics from “Let Her Go” by Passenger

I know for myself I have often asked the question, “Why does it have to be this way?” I think a lot of people have asked this question either to themselves, to others or to a higher power (however you choose to define that). It’s a biggie. I have struggled with it, gotten angry over it, questioned it, cursed it and until I had the courage to look inside and ask, “Why am I choosing for it to be this way?” did I get anywhere.

Many great teachers and leaders speak of the ability to know ourselves as a whole being and that we can’t know ourselves as whole without knowing all of ourselves, which includes our opposite. “Only know you’ve been high when you’re feeling low.” How could you possibly know you were high if you didn’t have the knowledge of low? You couldn’t.

Take this further. Through contrast, we gain the knowledge of who we are (remembering) by knowing who we aren’t. Secure in remembering who we are, then we are free to continually choose what we want to experience…to live our life.

Here is the tricky part. We judge the contrast. We form an opinion about high being good and low being bad (or vice versa), and therefore keep them separate. We don’t see that we need all the parts to know the whole. High and low are part of a whole, not two separate things. For without one, the other can’t exist. By knowing the contrast (high/low, hot/cold, wet/dry), we know the whole, and we can then make a choice of what it is we want to experience within the whole. We can experience hot or cold and we can experience warm, because we know the whole and we have access to all parts, allowing us to combine the parts in any way we want and not just settle for one extreme or the other.

We are love. In order to know that, we must experience the opposite, fear. Since we judge fear, we stay there. We get stuck. We forget that we are love and we begin to operate from fear. You see, all that we need to do is experience the opposite so that we know the whole and then choose where we operate from. We forget we have a choice. Just because we had to experience fear to know love doesn’t mean we have to stay in fear. Fear simply gives us the contrast we need to know we are love.

“Only know you love her when you let her go

And you let her go”

Did you know you can get her back if you want? You have that power. But you have to remember that you are love that knows it is love because it has experienced fear. Don’t judge. Don’t move from one end to the other. Don’t keep them separate. Unite them into the whole.