Learning to Let Go: The Fable of the Conversation Rocker
When is it time to let go and when is it time to hold on tight? So hard to tell sometimes. This is a true story about my slow path of learning the hard way.
Once upon a time, when I was brand new in my career and happy about making decent money for the first time in my life, I followed a whim and bought the coolest piece of art/furniture I had ever seen; The Conversation Rocker. It was, quite honestly, too expensive -- more expensive than anything I’d bought before other than our house and my car.
Crafted by an artist named Carl Grommell, The Conversation Rocker combined two seats into one impossibly-curved, gravity-defying rocking chair. I spotted it at a street art festival in Ann Arbor, Michigan while on one of my first business trips. I was ready to commemorate the bright future ahead, with my career taking off and with my first wife and I moving into our first home and starting our family. “If you see anything cool, just buy it,” she told me.
I was immediately mesmerized by its form. It didn’t seem possible that it could hold the weight of even one person, much less two. But I took the chance, sat down in one of the two open seats and relaxed happily. Moments later, my world was rocked, literally, when Carl himself sat down in the other seat, facing me on my left-hand side. His weight settling in started the gentle movement, and I felt myself being rocked unexpectedly and with no effort on my part. I was sold. This chair was going home with me, even if it was too expensive! It seemed like the perfect symbolic furnishing for the new life we were setting out to create, providing a place we could hold hands and share conversation while gently being rocked by each other…
However, as often happens with symbols and visions, it didn’t quite work out that way.
My wife loved The Conversation Rocker as much as I had, as a piece of art. But she did not love sitting in it. Our new house had slatted wooden floors that didn’t provide a seamless-enough surface, so that elegant sense of being rocked and transported by somebody else that I’d enjoyed in Ann Arbor didn’t get recreated in our house. Plus, the weight of the chair made noise on that floor. It just didn’t fit the way I hoped. And, with decades of hindsight, I think now that I should have let it go right then: sold it to someone for whom it fit and fulfilled its purpose. But I held on.
The Conversation Rocker sat, largely unused, for all the many years we lived in that house. Instead of providing the setting for warm conversations and mutual rocking, it became nothing more than a “conversation piece,” a cool thing that amazed people when they saw it for the first time, just as it had me.
The cracks in that wooden floor continued to grow over time, making it even more uncomfortable to attempt to sit and rock. Meanwhile, the cracks in our marriage grew as well. And so it was that The Conversation Rocker did end up being a fitting symbol of the life we had built in a completely unintended way -- a life that had so much potential, and so much beauty, but which became more characterized by the cracks and gaps than the potential.
When we finally divorced and went through the process of separating our assets, I was still not ready to let go of The Conversation Rocker. It was one of the few pieces of furniture I negotiated to keep. I still hoped to see it fulfill its potential and become a much-loved hosting place for warm, mutually rocking conversations. And Carl Grommell had retired by then, so there would be no replacing it.
The thing is, I didn’t even have a home for it at the time! Looking back, I can see this was yet another opportunity to just let go… but I was not willing. I arranged for one of my buddies to keep The Conversation Rocker in his house until I had a spot for it. With a great deal of effort and a lot of help, we got it onto his truck and sent it off to its new, temporary home.
I soon found what I hoped would be the perfect spot for it. Siobhan and I were beginning our new life together and began building our tiny house in the Western NC mountains. The Conversation Rocker would not fit inside, but we would have a large covered deck, and looked forward to that being a great place to enjoy it, sitting in the fresh mountain air. It wasn’t meant to be an outside piece of furniture, so not a perfect fit, but we figured it would be good enough.
We never got to test the fit.
Just months before our mountain cottage was completed, my buddy’s house burned to the ground. When he called me the next day to share this news, I could hear the agony in his voice, the state of shock he was in. Even while facing the loss of everything he owned, what he felt worst, he was saying, was that The Conversation Rocker had been completely destroyed, along with everything else.
“Man. I am so, so sorry…” he started to say.
But before he could even finish the sentence, I started laughing. I finally got the message that I’d been avoiding since first bringing this oversized hunk of art into my life. I laughed so hard that I doubled over and had to sit down. It was the perfect ending to the story, and I knew it.
As much as I wanted to hang on to that piece of furniture and breathe new life into it, to try to carry some of my earlier life into my later life, that was not to be. There’s a good chance that it would not have worked anyway, that it would not have fit any better in this new home than it had in the first one. The Conversation Rocker never symbolized what I wanted it to symbolize. It instead had come to represent reaching too far, trying too hard, holding on too tight. It felt good to finally let go, and to experience the lightness that came with that. (And, of course, I quickly shifted from that story to empathizing with my buddy on his house and his losses, which was a whole different story…)
Siobhan and I have since moved into our 472 square foot tiny house (and my buddy has moved into a great house, as well!), and in so doing have had to purge and let go of a great many things. It has been a wonderful and surprisingly easy process. I do not miss any of the things I’ve let go of, even some that were, like The Conversation Rocker, “symbols” I had imbued with a lot of extra meaning.
As I sit here in the evenings on the deck with Siobhan and Phoebe, enjoying the fresh air, the beauty of the mountain, and the warmth and ease of our camaraderie, I am experiencing what The Conversation Rocker was supposed to symbolize. And having the experience, I realize that I don’t really need a “thing” to symbolize it.
October 28, 2024