BBC Radio 4 2016-10-15

It was sad but still inspiring to hear of Jessica Ennis-Hill’s retirement this week. She is a national treasure, iconic of so much that was good about the Olympics, and perhaps of what we aspire to be ourselves - successful, down to earth...

So it must have taken guts. It’s always best with hindsight to quit while you’re ahead - but it has to be the hardest thing to do at the time, especially when you’ve worked so hard to get there.

And surely it’s yet more painful when who you are gets so wrapped up in what you do. Which goes for any of us who’ve poured love and dedication into our life’s work.

On this programme yesterday, it was mentioned how the boxer Ricky Hatton described his retirement as being like death before death. Which is heavy stuff.

Interestingly in spiritual terms, the idea of dying before you die is a positive principle, which helps prepare us for the inevitability of one day fully letting go.

Our ego wants to hang on for dear life to the trophies and trinkets we’ve worked so hard for along the way, partly because we end up mistaking them for who we really are; yet ultimately I’m not my car, my house; you are not your qualifications, your successes or failures.

And Jess Ennis-Hill, I think, helps remind us healthily that there is more to us than what we may be tempted to cling to.

As does the writer Eckhart Tolle, bringing it back to death, which, he says, is "a stripping away of all that is not you. So the secret of life is to die before you die," he writes, "and to find there is no death.”

It sounds dramatic, mysterious, but it’s metaphor, and for me it’s about learning to let go ... as we go - to the smaller things, whether possessions, or grudges, or seasons in life... - so that we can relinquish the bigger, heavier stuff, with grace, when we have to.

Not that it’s ever easy, and it goes against the grain to accept or welcome cracks in the shiny surface of our life - but new life does follow, in ways that we might find hard to imagine or accept at the time.

A story springs to mind by the priest Cynthia Bourgeault - of a dirty, capless acorn dropped by a bird into a group of proud, shiny acorns nestling at the foot of a great oak. Looking upward at the tree, he whispers: “We are that!”

“How can we be that tree?” the others mock.

“It has something to do with falling into the ground, cracking our shells,” he says.

“Totally morbid,” they reply. “Why, then, we wouldn’t be acorns anymore.”

Or even gold medallists, or whatever. But if we loosen our grip, we may find there are yet greater heights, and depths, to reach for like an Olympian.

First broadcast 15 October 2016