I like rainy days when I don’t have to be anywhere, and large thunderstorms are even better. We get some good ones around here.
I was listening to this marvelous storm just now, and it hit me how sad it will be when it’s gone. I was hoping it would rain tomorrow, but no luck: sunshine.
And it hit me that this basic process is behind most misery in the world. EVEN WHEN THINGS ARE GOING WELL most of us, after a certain age, start waiting for the other shoe to drop. We don’t go too deeply into even positive experiences unless we are in the throes of some powerful passion that causes us to forget “normal” restraint.
And such passions are valued of course for that precise reason.
We look wistfully at children, who are so innocent, who do not yet know how quickly the best things can vanish, how friendships fade, stable situations disappear, and how often we find ourselves as adults doing things we dislike, and perhaps even resent and hate.
But is this not the precise POINT of non-attachment? Entering emotionally into each moment as it comes, taking what joy and light from it there is to be had, and then letting it go while embracing the next? Flow? Openness? Shunyatta, the place without fixed form or time?
I would suggest non-attachment, in important respects, amounts to Learned Innocence. You have to learn both to enjoy and to let go. You have to be fully present to change, to the Wheel of Change, but beyond it because not attached to it.