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On Letting Go
For the closing of this year, practice the art of unburdening yourself.
Note: I originally published this piece a year ago. Then I unpublished it because it felt too personal. After some distance and time, I’ve decided to publish it again now.
As 2023 comes to a close, I would like to invite you to let go of the old, to unburden yourself rather than piling expectations upon expectations for another year. I’d like to invite you to do that by thinking about a set of metaphors that have accompanied me since my years as a philosophy undergrad: Nietzsche’s three metamorphoses.
Metamorphoses
In the beginning of his monumental Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche speaks of three metamorphoses of the spirit: “how the spirit becometh a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child.”
The chapter of “The Three Metamorphoses” sits right after the prologue and barely fills two pages. Yet, it is so important to the work as it also stands as a metaphor for enabling Nietzsche to create his work. To me, not only do these three metamorphoses lie at the heart of Nietzsche’s body of work, but they can also serve as a north star for our personal lives. A clean slate not as a nihilistic negation of all meaning, but as a canvas for becoming our truest selves.
The first metamorphosis of the spirit is of that into the camel. The camel is burdened by the values that are loaded onto it. It dutifully bears the heaviness of outside expectations. It is the sufferer of the imperative “Thou shalt”. But the camel does not only passively bear the load that is put onto it, it also accepts the load in order to rid itself from it, to begin the second metamorphosis.
The second metamorphosis is that of the camel into the lion, “here the spirit becometh a lion; freedom will it capture, and lordship in its own wilderness.” The lion slays the beast of burden of old values. “To create new values — that, even the lion cannot yet accomplish: but to create itself freedom for new creating — that can the might of the lion do.” The lion is thus just an interstitial, liminal form in the rite of unburdening. The lion counters the old “Thou shalt!” with the affirmative “I will!” And here it is important to note that in this “I will!” the…
