What If We Let Go?

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

The rope left blisters on my palms that year. It was roughly 1986; I was about eight years old, locked in what felt like the most important battle of my life... tug-of-war against what seemed like a wall of older, stronger kids. My sneakers left impressions in the dirt as I leaned back and pulled. I stared at the faces of my opponents, eyebrows furled, lips curled... that look that said, we weren't friends... we were enemies.

After several painful minutes, something extraordinary happened. One of the kids on the opposing team just stopped pulling."Wanna go to the swings?"

Suddenly, just like that, all that straining, all that pain, all that desire to win was over, and kids from both sides were laughing, comparing rope burns, and running off to the swings. The battle that had felt so life-or-death important dissolved into something else entirely...connection and the simple desire to play together.

Now, nearly forty years later, the news is playing in the background, and I recognize the same desperate grip. People align themselves with a side and pull the rope. But this rope stands between moral beliefs, religious convictions, and what people see as right and wrong. And this rope has real consequences. It doesn't just leave blisters on the hands. It dissolves into violence and sometimes...too often...it results in the loss of life.

Looking down the rope at the other side...people see hate, delusions, madness, grandiosity, violence, stupidity, and so on. Both sides feel their values are at risk. The side that pulls toward justice carries a wound about fairness, about protection of the vulnerable. The other side that pulls toward stability carries a wound about preservation, about holding onto what they feel is sacred and true. Neither side can let go. There is no compromise.

Stay with me for a moment... what I'm about to say may feel jarring. I invite you to sit with it and consider the lessons it may hold for you.

What if both sides are pulling from the same place? From fear and a desperate desire to protect what they feel matters most?

The energy we pour into opposition often feeds the very thing we’re trying to overcome.

The Dao teaches that water conquers rock not through force, but through persistence, patience, finding the smallest cracks and flowing through them until even mountains change shape. This isn’t weakness - it’s how worlds transform.

I think about this when I witness our national conversations devolve into something that looks less like discourse and more like warfare. Recent events have shown us again that violence - whether physical or rhetorical - never loosens the rope. It only makes both sides grip harder.

Violence can come in many forms. At the macro level, it shows up as tragic shootings and premature death. At the micro level, it's words on a screen repeated by many - wounds that slowly chip away at someone's connection to goodness...to love. It's still painful, and it still aims to silence or remove the opposition.

What is the imagined gain when we choose violence? Even when someone’s ideas are dangerous, even when their words seem to threaten everything we hold dear, silencing them doesn’t make their ideas disappear. It doesn’t change the minds of their followers. If anything, it transforms opponents into martyrs, makes their positions appear moderate and reasonable in contrast to a response rooted in destruction rather than creation.

This isn’t naive idealism about the power of civil discourse. It’s practical wisdom about how lasting change actually happens. When we understand that the battle is for hearts and minds, we realize that violence serves the opposite of our intended purpose.

But what if there’s another way entirely?

What if instead of finding better strategies to win the tug-of-war, we simply set down the rope?

Somewhere in the shadow of our national pulling match, people sit alone, feeling so disconnected from their communities, so unheard and unseen, that extremism of various kinds starts to feel like the only language that might make them matter. While we’re all busy pulling, they’re drowning in plain sight.

I think about the conversations I have now - not the ones where I’m trying to change someone’s mind or defend my position, but the ones where I simply listen. Really listen until I can hear the fear underneath their anger, the wound that’s driving their desperate grip on the rope.

When I stop seeing the person across from me as wrong and start seeing them as hurt, something shifts. When I recognize that their pull comes from the same place mine does - from terror of losing what’s precious - the rope begins to feel less important than the person holding it.

This doesn’t mean abandoning my values or pretending that harmful actions don’t matter. It means recognizing that healing occurs in the space between positions, in the moment when two people stop pulling long enough to see each other’s humanity... to catch a glimpse of love.

How do we collectively heal? Maybe it starts with each of us loosening our grip just enough to reach across the divide with curiosity instead of certainty. Maybe it means asking “What are you protecting?” instead of “Why are you wrong?” Maybe it means recognizing that the person pulling hardest is often the one hurting most.

The blisters from that playground game faded within a week. But the lesson has taken decades to understand: the moment we stop pulling against each other, space opens for something entirely different to emerge. Not victory for one side or the other, but transformation for all of us.

Maybe the revolution we need isn’t about pulling harder or even pulling smarter. Maybe it’s about learning to love each other back to wholeness.

What wants to emerge when both sides finally let go? I’m still discovering, but I’m brave enough now to loosen my hold and find out.