A Few Thoughts on Letting Go

I feel so so so so alive after an amazing evening talking with a good friend.

This feeling is so invigorating--engaged--deep--my friend is so deep, I love exploring depths of people and life--I love hearing wisdom--the poetry of my friend's language, the breadth of his experience--I am, I think, a person who loves to learn from all different life experiences, I seek out wisdom from experiences, from others.

So alive!

I want to keep this feeling, feel anxious about keeping this feeling. Then I remember something I read in "Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart" by Mark Epstein, which is a book about the intersection between psychotherapy and Buddhism/meditation. The author writes that his habit of trying to hold on to good experiences/things/feelings/etc. was so ingrained that after he learned to achieve a sense of deep letting go through meditation, he began to fear losing his sense of letting go. In other words, he was trying to hold on to letting go. He eventually realized what he was doing and worked to let his sense of letting go come in and out of his life, worked to trust that it would come back.

Scary scary scary that I cannot keep experiences, hold on to them, make them always be there for me. I feel like one lesson I'm starting to try to embrace is the fact that life is change; everything is always changing; part of really living is accepting that you cannot keep things the same, and by accepting this you perhaps can learn to really be present with whatever is happening for you at the moment.

My friend and I both have deep, deep love for music, and we were discussing last night some of our experiences and habits around listening to music. Since I was a child, I have had a fear that if I listen to a song I love over and over again, I will rob it of its potency. I used to have a rule for myself that if I really liked a particular track on a CD, I would have to listen to the entire CD rather than just that track so that I would not get bored with it. Similarly I limit myself on rereading of favorite books, rewatching of favorite movies; contained within these habits is the fear of the inevitability of loss; the fear that next time I pick up this piece of art, it won't give me what I've come to expect. I think these habits demonstrate a way in which I limit my ability to enjoy things that I love by focusing so much on my fear of losing them.

I experience so much less anxiety if I stop worrying about keeping good feelings indefinitely alive. Feeling amazing from my evening with my friend right now; goodness life is amazing, so so much more out there! This feeling cannot be kept permanently alive, things come and go, always changing all I can do is experience it right now. Perhaps learn to trust that good things will come into my life just as they go out; trust that other good experiences will come in, probably at some points experiences like this feeling...but in a way, more to the point....whether I have that trust or not, no matter how much I try to hold onto my feeling right now, I cannot do it; it is impossible. In that light, the only thing to do is, insofar as is possible (and for me at this point in my life, I do not know that it is possible to all that deep of a degree), to accept the reality that everything is always changing. Enjoy this moment, do not add anxiety by trying to hold on, by trying to do the impossible.

Hmmm

:)