In the end, says the  Dalai Lama, what matters is how well did you learn to let go?

If my granddaughter ever asks me what was most important to me during the presidential election of 2016, I hope I can tell her that what mattered was not who I voted for, or who I argued with, or what I did,or who lied the most, but how well I learned to let go of this profoundly dispiriting, disturbing, and sometimes even frightening experience.

If you can be molested and abused by a process, than I am a victim of this season of hatred and  rage. It covered me with dirty stuff.

I am letting go, and that is both a cleansing and spiritual experience for me.

I am done with the arguing, lying, posturing, insulting and exploiting behaviors of people who presume to lead us to better places. There is no longer any reason for me to pay attention to it. I will vote next week. I have a sense of who is going to win this scorched-earth and perhaps phyrric victory, but it doesn’t matter to me at the moment.

I am sick of it, and I am sick of hearing about it, and of breathless predictions, screaming matches that pass for commentary and thought, our civic discourse has become a kind of nightmarish and never-ending Super Bowl Of Hatred, filled with hyper-sports chatter about strategy, winning, losing and play-by-play. Too much information, too angry, and for too long.

Letting go also means not beating a dead horse, and  there is nothing much left to discuss or worry about. We’ve got it all. The truth is, it was over a long time ago, a kind of twitching corpse with a pacemaker nobody could turn off. They’ve made enough money off us, time to save ourselves.

I will not hook my psychic self into the acidic IV they call social media, that is a way to obsession and addiction, not to letting go.

I want to tell my granddaughter that I learned to let go in the election of 2015, and returned to life.  that was the big thing for me about this election. I will wake up next week find out what happened, and plunge deeply into the writing of my book, posting on my blog, caring for my farm,  taking photos, loving my wife and partner.

My eyes and ears are open now, to community, to people who can listen, to people who can talk, to people who have been left behind, to the poor, to people who care and would rather fix things than break them. I hope we are community now, those of us shamed by this season, I hope  that there is a club I can finally join.

Letting go is a profoundly spiritual exercise. It requires discipline, strenght,  faith, and empathy. It is not for the feeble or the weak-minded.

Underneath it all, we are all human beings trying to make our way through the complex process of living. When we lost that idea, we lose a part of ourselves. We are all susceptible to anger, hatred and fear.

Listening to broken people can be, I see,  a human addiction something the broken and frightened parts of us are drawn to and transfixed by. Network executives have known for a long time that there is much more profit in misery and hatred than good and nourishing things.

We are always drawn more to our worst fears than our greatest hopes and aspirations, that seems to be the way human beings are wired.

I am in search of my better side, I wish for a spiritual cleansing, a new start, this is underway. I can’t help what they do, and I can’t help what you do, but I can help what I let them put in my head. Better to be alone…

I am getting older, my time and days are precious to me. I am careful about how I use them or waste them.

I will say a prayer for me, for you for us. The point of life is to love and be fulfilled, I am on my way back.

How well can I learn to let go? How well did I learn to let go? I will tell you next week, or as soon as I know. A great test of my ability to love and know mysel.