Let It Be

When I was growing up in the sixties and seventies, the Beatles were always one of my favorite bands, and some of their songs speak to me in profound ways.  One of those songs is "Let It Be."  I have often thought about the meaning of the phrase "let it be" and wondered about its significance.

Paul McCartney wrote the song after he had a dream about his mother Mary McCartney, who had died when he was 14.  Paul said the Mary in song refers his mother, not the Virgin Mary, as many people have often assumed.  (It is, however, interesting to note that according to the gospel of Luke, when the angel Gabriel told the Virgin Mary she would be the mother of Jesus, she replied, "let it be to me according to your word.")

Paul also said that in the dream, which occurred during a difficult time in his life, his mother told  that everything would be all right, and he should just let it be.  Often when Paul was asked whether the song was about the Virgin Mary, he would reply that people were free to interpret the song any way they liked.  So, with the permission of none other than Sir Paul McCartney, I offer some thoughts about what the song means to me.

First, the phrase "let it be" is good advice about how to to think about the past.  In recent years, I have learned something about how to deal with difficulties from the past, things that make me angry, and things that sometimes seem beyond acceptance.  I have learned that when I am reminded of bad things that I can do nothing to change, I tend to ruminate on them excessively, to allow them to dominate my thoughts and emotions.  Continuing to do this would only result in my becoming bitter, and would not change the thing I am trying to accept.  So I've developed a mental trick to keep from obsessing over such things.  I imagine a wooden cabinet with drawers.  When I find myself dwelling on something too much, I imagine that I am putting that thing in one of the drawers and locking it up.  Then for awhile, while it is in the drawer, I am able to let it be.  Usually the thing I have locked up  eventually escapes that drawer and I will find myself focused on it again. But then I lock it up again, and I find that the more often I lock it up, the less often it escapes the drawer, and the less often have to deal with it.   

Secondly, the phrase "let it be" is good advice about how to think about the present.  Another thing I have learned in recent years is that most of the things in our lives that we think we control are actually beyond our control.  I am a planner and an organizer, and I am often surprised and irritated when my plan for today doesn't work out like I wanted. Stuff happens, as Forrest Gump famously said, and much of that stuff can neither be foreseen nor controlled.  I have found that instead trying to control things, it is wiser to be courageous, and to accept each day as it comes.  Instead of trying to completely control the present, just let it be. 

Lastly, the phrase "let it be" is good advice about how to think about the future. For me, the future has often been a scary place.  I hate not knowing what is coming.  Since I'm big on planning things, thinking about the future offers extreme challenges, since there is just no way to foresee the next 10 minutes, much less the rest of our lives.  So, it is easy to worry over the future, and sometimes events in the present contribute to that worry.  (Anyone with anything in the stock market has probably experienced at least a little of that worry in the past few weeks.)   

Jim Bishop once wrote, "The future is an opaque mirror. Anyone who tries to look into it sees nothing but the dim outlines of an old and worried face."  I find that thinking about the future is usually just worrying about it.  In "Let It Be,"  Mother Mary says, "There will be an answer.  Let it be."  For me, that means two things.  One is that if I'm worrying about the future today, I need to lock those thoughts up in that cabinet shown above.  The other thing is that although future is unknown,  I will not be alone, and there will be solutions to the things I face, just as there are in the present and there were in the past.  The future will come, and I must relax and let it be. 

Copyright © 2015 by Steven W. Fouse