Fall betrayed me this past weekend by raising temperatures into the 80s with around 100% humidity. My friends called me crazy for wishing for cooler weather, but I’m a firm believer that fall should be fall. Interestingly enough, they’re not the only ones still wishing for warmer weather. Some of the flower patches around Boston, once white, pink and red, have been replaced with new flowers of the fall variety. I have nothing against flowers and I definitely think they look nice, but flowers should not look this spectacular this time of year. So for today’s post I’ve written a little something about letting go… I extrapolated the subject matter quite a bit, so don’t think that it’s all about flowers 😉
Patchwork
Why do people hold on so dearly to things meant to pass? Is it fear? Is it love? Or is it some jigsaw puzzle of both that we arrange piece by piece so that we may bring order into our lives? Does this order even buy us happiness, or does it preoccupy us with its quest as we incessantly mash our puzzle pieces together until they are dull and frayed? We hold on to so many things in life – habits, people, objects, seasons, emotions, thoughts, behaviors, pleasures, desires… and the list goes on. Some of these things are indeed conducive to happiness, but holding on to any one of them leads to pain and suffering. Is it any surprise, then, that when we try to put them all together the resultant product is a hodgepodge of ill-formed logic and emotional distress? Most of us today would agree that knowledge is power, yet with the advent of knowledge and technology, depression and unhappiness have run rife.
Where, then, should we look for the answers? Should we turn to God? No, for by now we are all well aware of the dangers of preaching the validity of one man’s God over another. Should we abandon knowledge and technology altogether in a grand revival of the dark ages? Should we let go of everything to the detriment of ourselves and our neighbors? Surely we have evolved out of such practices for a reason, but we have also evolved into other practices which were never meant to be. When we are not holding on, trying desperately to construct our life, we worry that we may lose it completely. We compare and cross-reference everything to ensure we have the best car, house, spouse, etc. But in doing so many of us have lost track of who we are.
I propose a different solution. Letting go – not of responsibility and accountability, but of self. Our egos have grown with our knowledge and pushed us further away from each other. While we were once dependent on our neighbors for survival, today we put up fences to keep them out. Why? Do we love our privacy, or fear our neighbors? Too much energy is focused on the “right” thing to do and the attainment of the “perfect” life. But perfection is an illusion that has grown with the ego of man. Let it go, let it all go. Be spontaneous, be unpredictable, be the moment, and for God’s sake, throw your puzzle pieces on the floor so you can play twister… it’s way more fun.
Fall Roots
In our country we avoid thoughts of death. It’s something that’s out there, not to be thought of internally, and taboo. When we don’t acknowledge death, I think we try to hold onto the things you mentioned. We try to attain artificial success and belongings that will soon be gone. I think throwing away the ego is a solid step forward, but I’m not sure there is a single answer to finding true happiness. Maybe one of the problems is defining happiness itself. Is it a pure physiological state? A sense of importance? A sense of feeling approval from others? Lack of worry about basic human needs?
Do you know that we live in one of the happiest countries in the world according to survey?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:World_happiness.png
Canada seems like an unlikely spot, but it ranks among the highest. I would guess they have a similar culture to ours, but they may understand balance better than we do.
We usually perceive our world, our way of living, as beautiful because there is nothing else to perceive.
If one lives in this world, the globalized world of high technology, all one can see is one layer of commodity piled upon another.
In our world the “original” is the proliferation of the standardized. Copies are copies of copies. There seems to be no ability to see beyond, to see that we have encased ourselves in an artificial environment that has remarkably replaced the original, nature itself.
We do not live with nature any longer; we live above it, off of it as it were. Nature has become the resource to keep this artificial or new nature alive.
That being said, life is not so much about something, nor does it have a specific meaning or value. We are, after all, animated objects, objects in moving time, the meaning of which is up to the living.
By comparison, Art has no intrinsic meaning. This is its power, its mystery, and hence, its attraction. Art is free. It stimulates the critic to insert their own meaning, their own value.
So while anyone might have this or that meaning of Life, I realize fully that any meaning or value Life might have comes exclusively from the beholder.
This is the highest value of any Life, not predetermined meaning, but meaning gleaned from the experience of the living.
The experience is therefore the interest, not the meaning. If meaning is the point, then experience is the form. So in that sense, the meaning of Life is whatever you wish to make of it.
This is its power.
Matt and Roni, thank you both for your comments. They are rife with wisdom. In the near future I may post something that speaks a bit to what you’ve both brought up.