I’m Not Letting Go Yet
What would it feel like to hold someone — or something — a little closer this week?
On the body
A month in California means a lot of things. It means coffee from someone else's mug, and long afternoons that stretch past when you said you'd leave, and your daughter running toward someone's dog with absolutely no hesitation. It also means a lot of car time — the particular kind of sitting that American distances require, the kind where your glutes slowly forget they exist and your hip flexors quietly stage a protest you don't fully notice until you're back home and trying to move like a normal person again.
Add two long haul flights on either end and my body came back from this trip with a very clear agenda. My glutes, hips, and hamstrings are done being patient. They want attention, they want stretching, they want to be held with the same intention I gave everything else this month.
Which feels right, actually. I spent a month holding people close — long hugs, long visits, long conversations that ran past bedtime — and my body absorbed all of it. Carried the trip in its tissues. Now it's asking to be tended to in return. The embrace goes both ways, apparently. Even with yourself.
On the longer hug
At some point during this trip I made a decision, not consciously at first and then very much on purpose — that everyone was getting a longer hug than just hello.
Not a perfunctory arrival hug. Not the kind where you're already pulling back before you've fully arrived. A real one, held past the point where it would normally end, and then a little longer than that.
And I started saying it out loud. Right into their ear, while I was still holding on: "I'm not letting go yet. You're getting a longer hug."
The responses back were almost all the same — a laugh, a squeeze, a quiet yes, a small exhale that sounded like relief. A few of them laughed in that specific way people laugh when they're trying not to cry, when the happy feeling is arriving faster than their composure can keep up with. I recognized it because I was doing it too.
There is something about saying it out loud — I'm not letting go yet — that changes the quality of the hug entirely. You're no longer just greeting someone. You're telling them they're worth staying for.
I think we rush through hellos and goodbyes when there's always a next time already on the books. When you see someone every day, the hug is a formality because tomorrow exists. You don't hold on because you don't have to — there will be another one, probably before noon.
But this past year has quietly rearranged the way I think about that.
My best friend was diagnosed and treated for stage 4 inflammatory breast cancer. My parents and in-laws are healthy and vibrant and also moving into their golden years in the way that parents do, gradually and then all at once. My daughter and my friends' children are growing up in real time — changing between visits in ways that can't be undone or revisited. The three-year-old I met at the park last week will never be three again. I will never meet her at that age for the first time again nor will i get back those 3 years before I was around to meet her. That already happened, and now it's over.
None of that makes me want to stop visiting or stop loving people across the distance. But it does make me want to hold on a little longer at the door. To say it out loud. I'm not letting go yet. Not because I'm afraid, but because this moment — this specific version of this person, on this particular afternoon — is worth staying in for just a little longer than feels strictly necessary.
This trip I did that. And almost every single person leaned in instead of pulling back.
On closing the distance
Eagle Arms asks you to cross your arms, bind your forearms together, and lift. It's not a dramatic pose. But it's a surprisingly intimate one — you're wrapping yourself into your own embrace first, which creates an opening across the upper back. You have to close in to open up.
That's what the longer hug taught me this month. You have to actually close the distance — not approach it, not plan to close it, not think about closing it the next time you see someone. Close it now. Stay there past the point where it feels like you should let go.
My hips and hamstrings are tight from a month of sitting in cars and planes and other people's living rooms. But the rest of me came home fuller than it left. That trade feels exactly right.
The question is still open. I'll be sitting with it all week.
Who are you holding a little closer this week — and are you staying long enough to feel it?
Plant your feet. Open toward the light. This is how we grow.
This trip everyone got a longer hug — held past the point where it would normally end, and then a little longer than that. A few people laughed in that way that means the happy feeling arrived faster than their composure could keep up with. I recognized it because I was doing it too.