The Art of Non-attachment

How do you start a topic as potentially life altering as this one?

Lights are flickering. Glimpses of understanding seen through the fog of self delusion.

How trapped we all are! Bound by our expectations, haunted by our sense of failure. Exhausted from the constant fight to achieve some sort of arbitrary outcome that can never satisfy us.

I’m laughing because before I started writing this, I had the sentences all worked out. Now I’m physically writing it, words elude me. Entire coherent sentences vanished into the ether.

Nothing is solid. Nothing is permanent. Our lives, our relationships, our thoughts - they can disappear in an instant. Snatched away on the wild wind of life as if they never were.

And oh, how we grieve.

How we rail and shake our fists at fate.

As if we could stop it. This constant flow of existence. It is a constant demand. We want to chain ourselves against the onrushing tide. As if we could somehow, like King Canute, tell the waves to stop waving.

Far easier to dive into the water. Deep and cold and lonely as it sometimes is. And experience the journey.

Because the journey is all and everything. And the only way to embark on the journey is to jump off the rock.

Dissolve.

Let it all be.

With no judgement. No expectation. No clawing for the river banks, and the tangle of rotting vegetation.

That’s where we used to live. It’s weedy and infested there. Rank with doubt and self pity. Anger and humiliation.

But still we cling.

It’s what we know.

It’s where we live. Amongst the dirt and the stones. The self hatred and bitter judgement inflicted upon us by a society riddled with its own soul wounds.

I see it. I think I understand it now.

And having seen, I choose to dive.

I find I can still live a life full of gratitude and wonder and deep humility.

But from my place within the rushing river.

Part of the water. Part of the ocean.