Let it go

I was driving up the motorway, watching lorries play their slow-motion overtaking game. One lorry pulled out in front of me, crawling past another at +0.0001 mph, creating an endless tailback of frustrated drivers.

I felt my shoulders tense and my eyebrows knit into a deep frown, my eyes crunching through metal to bore straight into the back of the driver's head.

What the actual? Don't you realise I have somewhere to be? What difference is one lorry length going to make to your journey? Rooooaaahhh.

The more I focused on it, the more irritated I became. My frustration feasted on itself, spiralling until it filled my awareness.

And then it struck me: this is exactly how energy works. What we focus on expands.

When we pour our energy into frustration—whether it’s slow-moving traffic, negative comments, other people’s expectations or our inner creative muse’s sudden absence—we don’t just experience that frustration in the moment. We fuel it. It takes on a life of its own, lingering long after the event itself is over. We carry it with us, replaying it, reliving it, reinforcing it.

It dominates our awareness leaving no room for anything else.

But what if we let it go?

Does our frustration change anything? No. The lorries keep overtaking each other. Haters gonna hate. Your muse is going to do her thing.

There’s a lesson in this.

Just as frustration fuels itself, so does everything else. If I put my energy into creativity, something that lights me up, without judgement or expectation—then that will shape my experience. If I give my focus to writing, to storytelling, to creating something new, I generate a new emotional state—inspiration, motivation, flow, joy.

Creating isn’t always easy. Some days it feels like that slow-moving lorry, inching forward at a painful pace. But if I fixate on that struggle, I make it worse. I reinforce resistance, feeding the frustration instead of the creative spark.

Letting go isn’t about passively accepting everything. It’s about recognising what is within our control and what isn’t. Thought awareness—the ability to pause and observe our own mental patterns—creates space between a stimulus and a response. In that space, we have a choice. Do I want to feel frustrated about this thing? Is this where I want to direct my energy?

So, what if we just decided to let all that stuff go today? What if we take a deep breath, blow out expectation and frustration and focus our energy on what we CAN control?

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