The sublte art of letting go (Part I: Frozen)

Cape Town has a way of convincing you that danger is always scenic.

The mountain stands there like a promise, solid, familiar, and forgiving. The ocean below it, blue enough to lull you into believing that everything sharp has already been softened by beauty.

I had hiked Table Mountain more times than I could count. I loved it. Loved the way altitude thinned my thoughts. Loved how perspective returned the higher I climbed. The breeze and an audiobook in my ears causing my mind to fall into order step by step.

One day I took a gentle walk down toward Kirstenbosch. I was with a friend. Somewhere along the way, a German guy joined us, friendly, confident, and the kind of confidence that comes from speaking quickly enough that people don’t interrupt.

“There’s a shortcut,” he said, gesturing off the path. “I hike here often.” I hesitated.

Not enough to stop. Just enough to remember later. The trail narrowed. Then faded altogether. The ground thinned into a ledge.

“This is fine, hey?” my friend said.

“Ja,” the guy replied easily. “Just a bit exposed.”

That word, “exposed,’ should have meant something to me.

Then we heard it.

A sound I had never heard before yet somehow recognized instantly.

Hssssss.

The German guy stopped mid-step and slowly raised his hand.

“Don’t move,” he said.

This time, his voice had changed.

I followed his eyes.

The spitting cobra lay there, basking in the sun like royalty, coiled, unhurried, and almost luminous. Beautiful enough to make your mind hesitate just long enough for instinct to take over.

My body froze.

Not metaphorically. Literally.

My feet rooted themselves to the ledge as if the mountain had claimed me. My breath thinned to something barely voluntary. My heart, instead of racing, slowed into a strange, deliberate calm.

Later I would learn that this is how the body protects you, in a way like tonic immobility. That when the threat is close enough, movement is foolish. That stillness becomes strategy.

But in that moment, there was no learning.

Only obedience.

“Don’t look away,” he whispered.“Don’t blink if you can help it.”

The cobra spat, not to strike, just enough to remind us that it could.

And then, as quietly as it had appeared, the snake shifted, slid, and disappeared into the rocks.

“That was insane,” my friend said.

“Beautiful though,” the German guy added, shaking his head.

I nodded.

But something in me stayed behind on that ledge.

Because what I didn’t realize then was this:

My body learned a lesson that day, one it would keep repeating long after the danger was gone.

Freezing saved me once. So I kept doing it.

Not on mountains but in conversations. In decisions. In grief.

In moments where life asked me to move forward and I stayed perfectly still, waiting for a threat that had already passed.

I learned how not to provoke the strike. But I forgot how to walk again.

I didn’t freeze because I was weak. I froze because it worked.

At least at first.

There was a moment I can still feel it in my body. when something happened that I could not absorb. My chest tightened. My thoughts went quiet. Time thickened. I didn’t run. I didn’t fight.

I stayed.

Still.

Like Lot’s wife halfway between Sodom and the desert, I did not turn because I wanted to disobey. I turned because something behind me felt unfinished. Unanswered d. Unredeemed.

I thought if I didn’t move, the damage couldn’t spread. If I stared straight ahead, the snake wouldn’t strike. I learned early, like many of us do, that stillness can feel like control.

Years later, I watched someone I loved speak about something that happened thirty years ago as if it were still breathing down her neck. Her body had aged. Time had passed.

But the moment had not.

And then she became sick.

I don’t say that lightly. I don’t say it cruelly. I say it with fear, the kind that creeps in when you start wondering whether the body keeps accounts and the mind refuses to close.

That’s when I started to see it.

Unforgiveness is not loud. Rumination doesn’t shout. It whispers the same sentence every day until it becomes your native language.

This is not how it was supposed to go.

I built a small shrine there right where my expectations died. I didn’t bow to idols of gold. I bowed to versions of myself that never arrived. I worshipped outcomes. I lit candles to alternate timelines.

And all the while, time kept moving.

Stoicism says the pain is not in the thing itself, but in our judgment of it. Taoism says forcing the river only exhausts the swimmer. Christianity says you cannot walk forward while your heart remains buried in yesterday.

African elders say something quieter:

The dead must be honored, but they must not be fed.

I had been feeding a memory.

In Greek myth, Medusa turns men to stone not because she is evil, but because they stare too long. Perseus survives not by denial, but by reflection; he looks indirectly, through the shield.

That mattered to me.

Because staring directly into trauma didn’t heal me. Avoiding it didn’t either.

I had confused remembering with living.

Freezing kept me safe once. But safety is not the same as life.

At some point, the snake passes. And if you stay frozen long enough, you stop noticing that you’re no longer in danger, only delayed.

I am learning this now, not with triumph, but with grief.

I cannot stay in the past. But I am afraid of the future it created.

So, I stand here between listening to God say something I don’t want to hear yet:

You can’t resurrect what time has already buried. But you can still walk.

And for the first time in a long time, I am considering the possibility that letting go is not betrayal.

It may be obedience.