The Aerodynamics of Letting Go Part 3 by Goh Ling Yong
The first thing to go wasn’t the resolve, or the hope, or even the energy. It was the steadiness of my hands. I watched, as if from a great distance, as my fingers trembled around the thin lip of a porcelain teacup, a gift from a trip to Jingdezhen years ago. The pale celadon glaze, usually so cool and serene, seemed to vibrate with a life of its own. It was a pre-shock tremor, the world’s quiet hum rising to an unbearable, internal shriek.
Then, the crack. Not a dramatic shatter, but a sound like ice breaking on a still pond—a sharp, definitive split. The cup didn’t fall. It simply fractured in my grip, a fine, dark line spiderwebbing across its delicate surface. Hot jasmine tea, fragrant with the ghost of blossoms, seeped through the fissure, tracing a path of heat down my palm.
I didn’t flinch. I just stared. In that fractured porcelain, I saw the cartography of my own undoing. For months, I had been flying, or so I thought. I’d been maintaining altitude through sheer force of will, banking against emotional crosswinds, trimming the sails of my spirit to adjust for every patch of turbulence. I was an expert aviator in the treacherous skies of my own life, calculating, correcting, always pushing the engine just a little harder to climb above the clouds.
But every pilot knows about the stall. It’s the moment the air stops flowing smoothly over the wings. The moment lift gives way to gravity. It doesn’t happen because the engine fails; it happens because you’ve pulled the nose up too high, demanding an angle of attack the wings cannot sustain. You ask for too much altitude, too quickly, and the air, the very thing that was holding you up, abandons you.
And you fall.
My stall hadn’t been a sudden, catastrophic event. It was a slow, creeping inevitability. It was the accumulation of a thousand tiny pressures, a million unspoken griefs, the relentless demand to keep climbing when all I needed was to level out. The promotions I chased, the relationships I tried to mend with sheer effort, the facade of strength I maintained for everyone, including myself—each one was a degree of upward tilt, a little more strain on the wings.
Now, sitting in the quiet of my apartment, the scent of cooling tea filling the air, I was in a full-blown spin. The world outside my window—the distant hum of traffic, the gentle sway of the angsana tree—was a stable reality I no longer had access to. My inner world was plummeting, the horizon a sickening blur. And my instincts, the ones that had served me for so long, were all wrong. I was pulling back on the controls, desperately trying to get the nose up, to regain the feeling of flight. I was white-knuckling my way through conversations, forcing smiles, scheduling my days with ruthless efficiency, believing that if I just tried harder, I could fight gravity and win.
But the harder I pulled, the deeper the stall became.
The broken teacup finally slipped from my numb fingers, clattering onto the teakwood floor. It didn't shatter further, just lay there in two neat, wounded halves. The sight of it transported me, not to the mountains of Jingdezhen, but to the windswept expanse of East Coast Park, decades ago.
I was eight years old, my small hands raw from the friction of a kite string. My grandfather, Ah Gong, sat on a bench behind me, his face a roadmap of wrinkles creased into a gentle smile. The kite, a magnificent blue dragon he had made from bamboo and paper, was refusing to fly. It would catch a gust, lurch violently into the air, and then dive back to the earth as if tethered to a stone. I was furious, yanking on the string, running back and forth, trying to force it into the sky.
Ah Gong eventually walked over, his shadow falling over me. He placed his calloused, warm hand over mine on the wooden spool.
“Ah, Goh Ling Yong,” he’d said, his voice raspy like dried leaves, “you cannot force a kite to fly. You are fighting the wind.”
“But the wind is supposed to lift it!” I’d cried, frustrated tears welling in my eyes.
He chuckled, a low, rumbling sound. “The wind will do what it will. You are holding the string too tight. The kite has no room to dance. It cannot find the current because you are telling it where to go. You must let it feel the air.”
He gently pried my fingers open, forcing slack into the line. The string went limp in my hand, and for a terrifying second, I was sure the dragon would be dashed against the sand. But then, a gust of sea breeze caught it. With the new slack in the line, the kite didn't fight. It yielded. It dipped, then soared, catching a current I hadn’t even felt. It climbed, not because I pulled it, but because I had given it the freedom to fall first.
“See?” Ah Gong whispered, his hand still on mine. “Sometimes, to go up, you must first give it space to go down. You don’t fly the kite. You feel the wind through the string, and you let the wind fly the kite. Your job is just to hold on, but not too tightly.”
Letting go is not an act of surrender, but an act of trust.
The memory hit me with the force of a physical blow. I looked down at the broken cup, then at my own hands, still clenched into fists. For my entire adult life, I had been holding the string too tight. I had mistaken control for strength, tension for stability. I believed resilience was the ability to withstand any force, to never falter, to climb against the wind no matter the cost.
I was wrong.
Resilience isn't about preventing the fall. It's about navigating it. The first rule of recovering from an aerodynamic stall is counterintuitive and terrifying: you have to push the nose down. You have to point yourself toward the very ground you are afraid of hitting. This action decreases the angle of attack, allows air to flow smoothly over the wings again, and helps you regain airspeed. Only then, once you are no longer stalled, can you gently pull back and begin to climb.
You have to dive to survive.
Slowly, deliberately, I knelt on the floor. I didn’t try to piece the cup back together. The time for that was past. Instead, I picked up one half, its edge sharp against my skin. I ran my thumb along the new, raw line of the break. This was the stall. This was the fracture. It was not something to be fixed with glue and pressure, but something to be acknowledged.
I was not in control. I was falling. And for the first time in a very long time, I didn't try to pull up.
I closed my eyes and let the feeling of freefall wash over me. The missed deadlines, the strained friendships, the quiet loneliness that had become my constant companion—I stopped fighting them. I stopped trying to explain them away or muscle through them. I let them be. I pushed the nose down.
Tears, hot and sudden, fell from my eyes, splashing onto the pieces of porcelain. They weren't tears of self-pity or despair. They were tears of release. The soundless scream inside me quieted. The shuddering in my hands ceased. I was still falling, yes, but I was no longer spinning. The horizon was beginning to steady.
I gathered the pieces of the cup. In my hands, they weren’t just shards of a broken object. They were the evidence of a necessary breaking. A testament to the fact that some things must come apart before they can find a new form, a new wholeness.
That day, I learned that the aerodynamics of letting go are not gentle. It is not a graceful unfurling of the fingers. It is a terrifying, conscious decision to release the tension on the line, to push the nose toward the ground, to trust that in the heart of the descent lies the secret to flying again. It is the art of giving the wind back its power, and in doing so, rediscovering your own.
I still have the two halves of that teacup. I keep them on my desk, their broken edges facing each other but never touching. They remind me that strength is not in being unbreakable, but in the profound, terrifying, and ultimately life-saving wisdom of knowing when to let yourself fall. They remind me of the space between things—the slack in the kite string, the air flowing over a wing—and how it is in that very space, that emptiness, that lift is born.
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