I’ve been a health and fitness follower, learner, researcher and doer for a long time. I’ve accumulated certifications ranging from group fitness to personal training to nutrition and even a life coach certification. I’ve been through seasons of being balanced and healthy and seasons of over-exercising and undereating when I was not at my healthiest. I remember making up exercise routines in my bedroom growing up, spending hours on the stairmaster early mornings before bar review courses, hours learning step class routines, running, training for sprint tris, leading Bootcamp style groups, and following newest fitness and diet trends. Doing all the things to strive to be my healthiest.

Over the past few years, I’ve been learning something that I wish hadn’t taken me until this ripe age to learn.

Not in a dramatic, tear it down, move to Paris kind of way (but that thought has crossed my mind), but in those quieter, more uncomfortable moments. Those moments when you realize you have been comparing your present life against the version that doesn’t exist anymore.

Quite often, in my head, I hear myself singing, “Let it go, let it go. . .. “ in the voice of Queen Elsa in the Disney movie Frozen. I hope I have my princess correct here. I confess I had to google to make sure I named the correct princess! As a mom of three boys, I am terribly out of touch with most of the princesses. But I do think Elsa had something to say on this topic.

For a long time, I had a picture in my head of where I would be by now. How my life would look. All the things I would have figured out. I would feel settled, secure, certain and in control. As long as things were going toward the picture I had in my head, I was okay. I was moving forward and not falling behind.

Then, when life did not go as planned and did not line up with the plan, as I thought was the plan, instead of letting go of the plan, I felt I needed to hold on tighter. I could steer things back to the right path.

Sometimes that “trying to control” looked like anticipating conversations, lying awake perfecting the right thing to say at the right time, solving someone else’s problems, coming up with ways to fix just about any and everything that might need fixing.

It also looked like trying to work harder, plan better, anticipate changes quicker. The thinking was that I just needed to do more to stay in control so things would line up as (I thought) they needed.

Sometimes this looked like constantly negotiating with a life that was not at all interested in following the script I had laid out in my head. And as you probably guess, the more I negotiated and tried to control people and circumstances, the more I was disappointed. The bar I had set for those around me and how “things should be” or how I desperately wanted them to be, continued to fall short. Leaving me disappointed and frustrated, and sometimes, hurt.

When my marriage began to collapse, things began to move completely out of my control. The evil of alcoholism was not something I could control or fix by my own sheer will, I continued to be and do what I had always done. Find a solution, try to control the situation, be the fixer.

Until that stopped working.

I watched my life take such a veer off course and becoming something unrecognizable from what I had imagined and planned. Widowhood, single parenting, empty-nesting, finding a new career, all these changes forced me to learn to let go.

Loosening the grip on navigating my life and doing the same for my boys, was not an easy process. It began in small ways with hard questions. A whole lotta letting go. . . which has lead to where I am now.

The letting go allows my life to be what it is right now instead of what I thought it would be.

I honestly believe that has made me a much healthier person. My jaw can unclench. My stomach can lose the knots. I am not constantly waiting for a late night phone call or for the “other shoe to drop”. I’ve stopped anticipating bad news or planning how to fix the next problem. I’ve learned to actually, occasionally sleep at night. I can laugh. I can feel peace. I can let go of worrying about things that I absolutely cannot control.

The hardest part wasn’t where I ended up - it was releasing where I thought I should be.

My bar may still be high with expectations at times, but I’m sitting back and seeing how things shake out. I can let go of disappointment.

And not to sound whiney at all here. I am in love with so many things of my life. Letting go didn’t fix everything or make my life easier or more predictable. But my mind is quieter, more at peace. My body is calmer. That, more than all the healthy meals and all the workouts and fitness classes, is what makes me feel healthier right now.

There is health and wellness in knowing that not everything needs to be managed to be okay. Also, okay now is completely different than what I would have considered to be okay. I believe I’ve gotten healthier by holding on to less. Learning to “let it go”.

So I wonder how much better we could feel if we stopped trying to control everything?