By Dina Aldabbagh

I heard something some time ago that always makes its way back to my mind: “Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly” — something G.K. Chesterton wrote in his 1908 book Orthodoxy. Something about this statement really touched my soul and I wasn’t quite sure why. Now I understand it’s really the whole secret to life — lightheartedness. 

You may be filled with love, and yet your world is so dark. It feels like a constant battle upstream to see and feel the good in life. Let me relieve you…stop working so hard at it. It’s intentional work, but it’s not heavy. The decision to be happy in each moment feels light. It feels like a letting go, a release. It doesn’t feel like a talking to, a disciplining, a persuasion, or a negotiation. Instead of seeing it as something where you are staring head on at yourself and trying to tell yourself to just be happy, or convince yourself of it, see it as a hand holding. You are sitting next to yourself and letting whatever truth is in your soul be spoken — no expectations of what needs to be said or shame in response to it. 

You sit with yourself, softly smile, and say, “I understand. Now, how about we try this thing instead?” It’s a kind suggestion for your best interest — there’s a softness to it. The reason it feels so heavy for you is because your denial of your true experience is creating resistance. The you sitting across from you feels unheard, like a burden who you’re trying to just “get to do the right thing.” There’s shame and suppression there. All that sadness you feel…it doesn’t have to stay. The sadness is heavy, but you can renew your mind and then everything that once felt so heavy will feel so light. 

Aldous Huxley put it beautifully in Island:

“It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days…Lightly, lightly — it’s the best advice ever given to me…So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking your feet, trying to suck you down into self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling…”

All that seriousness…you can release it. You can metabolise all that gravity so that you can float. This is alchemy. You can get out of things, people, connections, and opportunities what they’re naturally offering you. Choose the good parts and let go of all else. Life becomes fun; you get to touch life lightly and see how it moves. Not with any insistence on an outcome…just to see what happens. This is what it means to be lighthearted. Things aren’t that serious.

They say, “God is light,” that doesn’t just mean he’s the sun, the source of life. It also means: he’s light, not heavy. The “enemy,” as referred to religiously, is heavy. This energy wants to pull people into the heaviness, the seriousness, all the deep emotions. But God wants us to walk as lightly as children. To not care so much, although we feel intensely. To be detached, although we desire strongly. To move on quickly, although we are openly vulnerable. To feel no embarrassment or shame — to just be. To grow because it’s in our best interest, not because we “should” since we’re not already enough. To be curious, open, honest. To bounce back quickly. To not think so deeply about things. To almost feel too much safety, because danger does not threaten us, since our Father is watching our steps. To be bold, because we trust the one who watches over us. 

To just go for what we want, because we’re not concerned about the future. To be present, because we’re not worried about the next moment. To allow our countenance to be an accurate representation of how we feel. To be kind, but force no two-faced niceties. To act with no worry about how the world is perceiving us. To be colorful and wear our interests over us, rather than try to craft the perfect image. To be an honest representation of our spirit and our spirit’s current experience. To feel no pressure to be anything but what we currently are. 

To expect that others are looking to love us. That they probably already do. To love because it feels good to be in a loving state. To simply turn our faces away from things that don’t feel good without making it mean anything about ourselves or life. To not think so hard. To flow. To not be rigid. To seek out joy as often as possible and let it last as long as it does. To be okay with temporary things. To put our attention on only what feels good.

Have you ever noticed that? How it’s so hard to get a child’s attention if something doesn’t interest or excite them? And it’s so hard to turn their attention from what does.

God wants us to be tuned in to us. Not to be putting on an act. To let our attention flow where it genuinely wants, and let that guide us. To let our desires be clean and our intentions honest. He doesn’t want us to be more profound or enlightened or serious or deep. Because he knows, the most profound quality in a person is to be self-sovereign. To look at the face of darkness and be completely unaffected. To not let the darkness in front of us creep into the room with us, but to let our light shine wherever it lands — and let that be the overpowering force.

Lightly, child. Lightly. I’m leaving Madrid soon for my next thing in life. Part of me is so boo hoo that I’ll be leaving this place — I really love it here. But it’s not a loss if I leave now. I already got something from it. It’s my destiny to go to this new place, Arizona, right now. It’s okay for me to love Madrid so much that I wish I had more time, but it’s also okay if my time here was just temporary. I trust if it wasn’t in my best interest to go to Arizona, God wouldn’t have let it work out. I don’t need to sit here and fret about starting over somewhere new whilst leaving this beautiful life I’ve created in Spain. I have no idea what Arizona holds for me, but I trust myself to make the grass green wherever I go, even in the desert. I’m not taking it too seriously, so I get to say, “Let’s see what life has for me,” and know that no decision is final. Everything is fluid. 

When we’re kids, our parents make the plans and we simply go along for the ride. Every day they make for us feels expansive, because we don’t know what’s in store and we’re not worried about it either. We let our parents, whom we trust, do the heavy lifting, and we just enjoy. Then we become adults, and suddenly…everything is so weighty. So important. So rigid. This plan needs to happen like this because then I will truly enjoy. “I’ve got a vision for my life and for this day and for this event and for this relationship and if I don’t put the effort to make sure it goes according to plan, I may never get the experience of life I seek.”

But what if we let go of the cruciality of a plan and an outcome? What if we let our Father, God, just do the heavy lifting on our present and surprise us? What if we didn’t NEED a certain day to look like anything in particular, and what if we just went along with whatever destiny had in store for us that day? Perhaps it’s not that important that life looks a certain way, and it’s really more important that it feels a certain way. Well, you think by planning out the perfect unfolding that then things will feel good, but that just results in heaviness, anxiety, and rope burns on your hands from gripping so hard. The paradox is that the harder you try to make it feel good, the worse you feel from all that high-stakes, exerted effort. But when you let go of the reins a bit — maintaining a very loose grip — you get to see what direction the rope is being pulled by life, and follow that thread without getting friction burn, without the sting of resistance. 

Taking things lightly will set you free. Deciding to not let things be so important — to matter so much, to mean such grave things about the bigger picture of life — is the key. Taking things too seriously is an attractive offer, because it feels safe. If you take things seriously, that must mean you’re thoughtful and aware, and thus danger can’t just sneak up on you. You’ll see it coming from a mile away. But when you take things lightly…well, we have this idea that lightheartedness equates to naivety. It signifies a lack of thought, and therefore a lack of intelligence. 

However, what it really signifies is a surplus of trust. Trust in yourself, trust in the universe and its destiny for you, and trust in God. Lightheartedness is your way of showing that you do truly trust God. You trust him with your future and you trust him with your now. Taking things lightly doesn’t mean a lack of intelligence, it means a lack of judgement. You can still be aware without rushing to give things meaning. Discernment and evaluation, not judgement. 

Allowing yourself to not judge things takes definitiveness away from what circumstances mean for your life as a whole. It takes off the pressure from you to have to drive forward the universe. To define things. To make things out of something. You’re just along for the ride and whatever happens, happens. “It’s not my job to judge this,” — it lessens the load, hence, lightening it. 

We can go through life saying, “This isn’t asking to be judged by me. I don’t have to give this thing meaning. I always have the right to no opinion. It doesn’t mean something deeper, I don’t have to make it deeper than it is. I can allow things to be.”

This lets you be in the present moment when you don’t try to interpret everything and assign it all meaning. You may feel the urge to judge something, but you don’t have to. You can train yourself to observe things without defining them. Thus allowing reality to shift in front of your eyes. When you dont give something harsh boundaries — when you don’t build a wall — but rather recognize lines in the sand, you allow reality to be fluid, so you don’t anchor yourself to any story or “truth.” Because your perception of reality — your definition of things — influences reality. 

Letting things not matter so much shows that you trust the unfolding of your life.If after every little thing that happens you’re freaking out because you think it means something about the grand scheme of your life, you don’t actually trust in your destiny. You don’t trust that things are happening as they’re ultimately meant to. Instead, you’re anxious. You think there’s a “should” life is meant to be looking like, and any small event that on the surface speaks to the contrary, you then make catastrophic. 

The key is, you don’t take things lightly because you’re foolish, you take things lightly because you’re strong. You’re not scared of a little bug, because you know how much bigger and stronger you are than that bug. You don’t fear what is smaller and weaker than you. That’s why you don’t care. You know who is in charge: you…and God. So this trust that you are able to face the world and handle whatever comes your way — that takes away the need for the defenses. Instead, you become light. You know if a threat comes, you’re strong enough to handle it. You don’t need walls up when the weapon is you. A glass case encloses a very fragile piece of art — but you are not fragile.

Your lack of fragility and your abundance of strength lets you go run through the world at reckless speed, thinking not about every step, but almost dancing through life. You’re not afraid of bumping into things. You’re not afraid you’ll break if you brush up against something. Not because you don’t think about the potential consequences, but because you know how strong you are and what you can handle — and you know anything you brush up against doesn’t threaten your safety. It can’t destroy you. It often can’t even hurt you. But you also trust your recovery. You know that even if you do get seriously hurt, that wound will heal up and the calluses it creates will only make you more durable. 

So I tell you, “lightly child, lightly.” Things don’t matter that much. Yes, the world is abundant with meaning and there’s so much interpreting able to be done, but you don’t have to figure out the meaning behind everything. You can just lightly brush up against reality and see how it feels. You can become present, and redirect alongside the flow of life, rather than planning 10 steps ahead. Be like a child — free, joyful, peaceful, light.