Letting Go of the Handlebars

How Early Experiences Shape Our Grasp on Control and Freedom

Writer and personal friend Seja Brumley returns to offer a profoundly touching essay that skillfully captures the complexities of life through a poignant mix of loss, human connection, and control. Seja writes:

I was five when Charlie passed away. He was nine years old, our neighbor, and my brother David’s best friend. Charlie had been sick, and I knew that, but when he died, I didn’t really understand. He had been fine the days before, and then it all went very quickly. I was told that was how cystic fibrosis worked.

Charlie was such a force, especially when he and David got together. It was a hot summer day in 1981 when David and Charlie knocked on a neighbor’s door to inquire if they could swim in the in-ground pool. An older gentleman answered the door and said, “No boys, not today.” Instead of taking this in stride and hopping on their bikes to find another house with a pool, they decided to break into their stash of fireworks and place them in this neighbor’s mailbox—not just any fireworks, of course, but M80s. (Ah, the 1980s... a time when a 7- and 9-year-old always had explosive fireworks on hand.) Needless to say, they blew up the mailbox and, two weeks later, had to spend a day at the local fire department learning lessons in fire safety.

The days after Charlie died, I developed what some might call an obsession with control. The little voice in my five-year-old brain told me that the reason Charlie died was that there was a missing action somewhere, something that wasn’t done to keep him safe. I decided that if I could somehow control all the variables around me, I could keep everyone around me safe forever. My mother told me that I began to ask her not to leave the house when I went to school. “You would put your little backpack on and before you walked out the front door to go to kindergarten, you would say, ‘Mom, don’t leave today. I will see you when I get home.’” This began my attempt to control the world around me as much as possible. Charlie had been fine and then he wasn’t. How could someone with so much life pass away? I could not stop Charlie from being sick, but I could try to prevent anything bad from happening to anyone else in my life.

You can imagine how much this would be to carry for anyone, much less a five-year-old. My parents began to see the stress this caused me and talked me through it many times. I have done much inner work throughout my life to learn to let go of control—having two teenage daughters has been an intensive exercise in this lesson.

So, I take the first step. I ask my mind to slow down, to rest. I take a deep breath. I close my eyes. I remember it is not all for me to hold. Human individuals were not built to carry all the world’s injustice and strife. We can pick out the parts where we feel we can make a difference and are moved to help, but we cannot hold it all. I could not hold it all as a little girl, and I can’t hold it all today, whether it is the pain of a friend or loved one or the injustice of the world.

I still remember riding my bike with my brother and his friends that summer, my little yellow Schwinn trying to keep up. They rode so easily, their hands off the handlebars, laughing. I asked them to teach me. They just yelled over to me, “Just let go!” I gripped my handles so tightly. I couldn’t possibly let go. My brother again yelled, “Sej, let go of your handlebars! It’s going to be okay!” Something courageous moved me at that moment, and I sat back, closed my eyes, looked forward, and let go. And I rode. I didn’t fall. I began to laugh. I looked over at my brother and his friends smiling and pictured Charlie, too, riding and smiling and telling me what a good job I was doing. I was doing great. I would let the wind run through my hair and spread apart fingers in the sky. I didn’t have to hold on so tightly. I could let go and be okay. And the world would somehow be okay, too.

Peace,

Seja