Post #19: Hold on Tightly, Let Go Lightly

20 May 2023

Seneca, in the fourth of his Epistles, muses that “no good thing benefits us while we have it unless we are mentally prepared for the loss of it.” The same idea is also expressed in a less lofty but perhaps more memorable manner by a character in “Croupier,” a 1998 British neo-noir film in which the main character is so pressed for cash that he has to sell his beloved sports car to a nasty car dealer for a ridiculous price. “Hold on tightly, let go lightly,” he says to himself, smiles, and tosses the keys at the fellow, who is astounded at his good cheer.

The mental attitude that the gesture and the line capture so beautifully is one we get to hear about all the time (“Just let go”), but in nine cases out of ten it is bullshit, because there is nothing “just” about it when we face such a situation for real. It’s not when letting go is easy that the principle is put to the test, but when it is difficult to the point of near-impossibility. Epictetus talks of kissing one’s wife or child good-bye remembering that they are human, that is to say mortal, hence ready not to see them again when one returns home; but this is setting such an unattainable standard of non-attachment that most us would probably take offense at its inhumanity before taking it for a serious moral example.

In a more amusing manner, Charles Bukowski talks in one of his books about never starting a job without expecting to lose it before long, and Jesus, more gravely, spoke of gaining life by losing it. Gandhi, in his “Message on the Bhagavad Gita,” wrote that the center around which the whole Gita is woven is nothing but detachment from the fruits of one’s actions, that is to say, a readiness to act as one ought, not with indifference towards what its ultimate results might be, but in a spirit of acceptance towards its consequences, whatever they may turn out to be. If an action cannot be performed with such a willingness to let go of its fruits, then it is better left undone, says Gandhi.

How realistic this program is for any of us remains to be seen when the calm of life, which cannot be trusted, is suddenly replaced by a raging storm, which can happen from one instant to the next. “Pleasure boats that were out all morning are sunk before the day is over,” as Seneca puts it in the same letter. It is then, and only then, that we shall know how attached we really were, and if we cannot even feel the loss in such a situation, as is sometimes the case, then it is even worse since it tells us that the pain is so overwhelming as to be completely beyond our powers of coping. The mind has to freeze the zones in question, to deaden them in effect, or the agony would be intolerable; but dead tissue is no sign of health, even if may no longer hurt.

For my part, I understand very well that my own disposition towards frustration, bitterness, resentment, melancholy, even despondency—nearly everything short of outright despair—is no doubt owed to precisely this over-attachment, which in turn is presumably a symptom of seeing the world from a perspective that remains too self-centered in just the ways that the Buddha warns against. I am not ready for the premier league where such attachments are left behind, but I can see them clearly, feel the misery they cause with awareness, and make myself as comfortable with the inevitable results as I can. Perhaps one day I will be able to move beyond that way of dealing with the problem, but that’s not likely to happen tomorrow. It may be a small step for a man who has been transported to the moon to set his foot on the lunar surface when only one rung of the ladder remains. But to get there is another matter altogether.

The art of letting go of our attachments, if it is to be more than a hoary cliché, is ultimately the art of living itself, and even more so, the art of dying; for what are our smaller losses but an anticipation of the one great loss that awaits us all? And I can see how that letting go comes down to weakening the fierce identification that comes so naturally to us with things and people—and perhaps even more, thoughts and feelings—that we treat them as if they belonged to us as a matter of course. Well, they do not, as we will discover sooner or later—not even our own bodies and our minds—at least not in the sense we would need to keep us safe in the world. The safety is an illusion; the loss and the agony are terribly real, so long as we remain as we are.

None of which is to say that the blessings that life brings to us along the way should not be enjoyed, so long as we can learn our lessons about them eventually, namely that the more relentlessly we attach to and identify ourselves with them, the more desperately we clutch and cling, the more brutally they will be torn from us. Accept what comes with gratitude and love, reduce the resistance to what we cannot change, and learn to let go lightly when the time comes. It’s a tall order—maybe too much, once again, for a single lifetime, at least for a confirmed clinger-and-clutcher like me. But I console myself that this is no one’s problem in particular, but a human universal, perhaps the defining feature of our ordinary condition as sentient beings struggling for survival in an inhospitable world. The change will not come easily, if it will come at all, but let’s keep walking together and find out how far we can go, taking things one moment and one heartache at a time.