Time To Detach

Courtesy: theladders.com

“I wish I had got that job.”

“I wish that girl liked me back.”

“I wish I had done it earlier.”

How often do you hear this? If you ask me, quite a lot! To find that so many people around me are living a life in regret is both astonishing and sad. Nearly always, I can see that they have enough opportunities around them to compass the same level of satisfaction and happiness that they are yearning for but for some reason they just can’t see it themselves. At times, it is not possible for us to visualize our situation from a third person’s perspective which is almost always far more objective than our own.

Many of us believe that there exists a puzzle that we are confined to. Certain turns inside would lead us to what we are hooked to (say a goal) and other turns will take us to a dead-end or worse, into a river of despair. We would live a great life only if things go according to our plans. If we take certain wrong decisions or things don’t go as planned, we will miss out on what could and should have been ours—what was available for the taking. We are so attached to the goals that we fail to recognize that we live in a world of infinite possibilities.

Attachment is a bit like an addiction. It binds us to what we want and leaves us all sniveling when we don’t get it. From my personal standpoint, we can have a preference for things to be in a certain way but we can also be okay with it not happening as we planned or as we thought. 

If we dig deeper and look beneath the 'things that we think we want' and try to understand what those things represent to us or what experience or quality they possess, we would find that it is the experience or the quality it possesses which we actually desire even more so than whatever the thing might be. For example, it might not be ‘the dream job you could not get’ what you are attached to, but the satisfaction and status it provides, or maybe it’s not about a particular girl or a guy you like but about the feeling of being loved back by someone you love. 

Great Buddha said – “Most of the time we are chasing after the symbol when it’s really the thing beneath the symbol that we are actually longing for”. For once, just look beneath the symbol and try to find out for yourself, what is it that you actually desire. Once you do this, you would realize that the symbol or “other things like that symbol” could also allow you to experience the feeling it represents. Only when we are comfortable with the idea of uncertainty and know that things might not always happen as planned, we can start seeing things objectively. It is said that,

“Detachment is not that you should own nothing, but that nothing should own you.”

Courtesy: dadstartingover.com

 Sometimes we approach the idea of detachment almost in a way of disconnecting with life – like nothing matters anymore.  But, that’s not the case, instead, when we detach ourselves, we understand that everything is impermanent. We are neither hooked to things nor do we push them away. Detachment helps us identify that there could be many different ways to get from one point to another. They say, “Action without attachment to the outcome is the secret for a life without stress”. Well, I wouldn’t disagree. 

I could never ‘let go’ of things easily but I changed for good. In fact, to such an extent that I am struggling to hold on to things now 

If you are someone living in regret and found this post a piece of shit, I would recommend you to read my personal favorite – “Who moved my cheese” by Dr. Spencer Johnson. It will definitely give you the push you need.

Hope all this was something relevant and even if you think it wasn’t, I wouldn’t mind, because –

I have taken my ‘time to detach’!