Hold On, Let Go

Every day is freighted with baffling questions, about pain and love, about joy and purpose. Hold On, Let Go is a small collection of field notes for those days when we feel a little more lost than usual.

Lovely and cruel. Simple and difficult. Extraordinary and quotidian. Sometimes on the same day. Being alive… and the questions that we carry around with us. Questions as ancient as our oldest ancestor and as fresh as the morning coffee.

Why is there something rather than nothing? What is this thing called love?Why did she have to get sick? How come music makes me cry?

We once looked for answers in churches or synagogues, in mosques or temples and over several thousand years those great households of religion claimed a monopoly on the answers.

But many of us stopped believing in them and stopped belonging to them. We’re fine sitting in the tranquility of some ancient house of prayer, but please don’t tell us what to believe. We’re shy of certainty, suspicious of authority.

But still, those questions…

Is there some hidden current which might carry us through our days? The resonance of some distant melody. How the big moments — the birth of a child, say, or the death of a friend — leave us wondering about how to live in the small moments.

If love is worth it. How to forgive someone. Why people pray. The shape of a good life. What nourishes us and makes us strong? What diminishes us, wears us down.

What to hold on to. Or let go of.

Less of a ‘how to’ book than a ‘try this’ book, this small collection of field notes is about keeping your feet on this sacred earth. And taking wing. At the same time.

Hold On Let Go, by Malcolm Doney and Martin Wroe is available from Wild Goose Publications... and other places where good books keep each other company. Lifelines, a limited-edition predecessor to Hold On, Let Go was described by Brené Brown as ‘beautiful, wise… and playful’ and by Matt Haig as ‘full of lovely reminders of what we too often forget.’