Photo: Snake3yes
Several weeks ago, my now 15-month-old son developed a fever to 103.5 F. Usually a champion sleeper, that night he woke several times with a frenetic look in his eyes and a jerkiness to his movements that frankly unnerved me. The heat coming off his little febrile body almost made me start sweating myself. He had no other symptoms to suggest the cause of his fevers, and even though our pediatrician had been reassuring when I’d called early in the day (“fevers in kids are a dime a dozen”), my doctor brain was kicking in full-blast with worry over it’s cause.
The fevers lasted five days and then ceased on the sixth, just as a diffuse rash broke out over his chest, neck, and arms. “Roseola,” I told my wife after a quick bit of research, a benign viral infection that strikes children ages 1-3. Our pediatrician confirmed the diagnosis and within two days he was back to normal.
WE ALL HAVE ATTACHMENTS
From the moment we’re born we face a troubling paradox: life is made interesting, fun, and happy by the attachments we form, but the loss of these same attachments lies as the root cause of our worst pain in life. Even when merely threatened with the loss of a beloved attachment—whether a person or a thing—we often suffer. The historical Buddha, Shakyamuni, referred to birth as the first of the four sufferings (old age, sickness, and death being the remaining three) to indicate that being born into this world inevitably destines us to suffer the pain of separation from our attachments. These four sufferings are what led him to ask this most fundamental question: how can we achieve any kind of meaningful, lasting happiness when every person and every thing to which we ever become attached will eventually be lost to us?
COMMON SOLUTIONS
There are many ways people throughout history have either consciously or unconsciously attempted to answer this question. What follows are the strategies I’ve found to be the most common ones:
- Limit the number of external things upon which we base our happiness. When we lose something we care about, this approach often leads us to remind ourselves things like, “At least I still have my health” or “As long as my children are okay, I’ll be all right…” But two problems exist with this strategy: one, we remain vulnerable to losing everything, including those few things we think we can’t lose and still remain happy; and two, whenever we do lose one of those key attachments, feeling grateful for not having lost something equally or even more precious rarely blunts the pain of it.
- Attach to nothing. An unreachable goal many people attempt anyway. Desire is ingrained in us psychologically, physiologically, probably even genetically if for no other reason than to ensure our survival. How can you live without being attached to breathing, for example? Further, human beings are intrinsically meaning-seeking creatures—but how could we create value if we weren’t attached to achieving goals? How would it serve our friends, our spouses, or our children to limit the degree to which we care about them simply to be able to diminish the force of the blow that losing them might one day bring us?
- Attach to things but deny the pain of their loss. Another common strategy doomed to produce more misery than it avoids. As experience confirms, when we refuse to allow ourselves to experience legitimate grief, it remains somewhere within us, freezing our ability to recover from our loss. Experiencing grief over loss is necessary to return to happiness. Any pain we’re due that instead we bury will fester like a wound that never heals, often manifesting in surprising—and always damaging—ways.
APPREHEND THE TRUTH
How, then, can we be happy if our lives are destined to be filled with the pain of loss? The answer, I believe, lies in breaking through two delusions:
- That our happiness is created out of any one particular attachment, no matter how precious it may be. For me, this would mean giving up a belief that I couldn’t be happy if I lost my wife, my son, or my ability to write. There was, of course, a time in my life before I had any of those things when I was nevertheless happy. Why, then, if I lost them now do I believe such happiness would be impossible to regain? The answer: not because it actually would be, but because I believe it would be. There are numerous reasons why I believe this—and if you’ve suffered a heartbreaking loss, you may be screaming out that you can’t be happy again even as you read this—but the truth is you can even if you don’t want to be. As I wrote in a previous post, Letter To A Widow, having lost a loved one we sometimes become reluctant to fully surrender our grief even after it’s run its proper course, as if it were something precious in and of itself—perhaps believing the pain of loss is the only thing keeping us connected to our loved one, or that to feel happy again would be to diminish the significance of the relationship we once enjoyed. But neither is true. If I allowed the loss of my son to destroy me, it would only happen as a result of just exactly that: my allowing it.
- That the pain of loss necessarily destroys happiness. Pain, by definition, is aversive. But viewing the pain of loss from an enlightened perspective can give it a purpose that mutes its aversiveness just as when a weightlifter embraces the perspective that “pain equals gain” (the pain of lifting a heavy weight is transformed into a survivable—even enjoyable—experience because of the result it produces, growth). The Buddha’s solution to the inevitability of the suffering of birth was to connect to a source of happiness that relied on nothing external, a connection he was ultimately only able to attain by using the pain of being separated from his attachments as a springboard. And having achieved that connection to the core truth about himself he was able to manifest a life-condition in which he could experience all of life joyfully—even while being at the same time sad, mad, hurt, or ill. As I wrote in another previous post, Changing Poison Into Medicine, it’s precisely because we’re challenged with the pain of loss that we’re able to develop this lofty state of life.
IT’S EASY TO SAY…
…but quite another to believe such a state of life is possible. And even quite another to actually manifest it. And yet…I’ve experienced brief moments of what that kind of life-condition feels like. And each time I’ve thought to myself: if this experience can happen for a single moment, why couldn’t it happen for several moments? Why couldn’t it happen for an hour? A day? A week? Why, in fact, couldn’t it become my predominant life state? And yours?
This would require, it seems to me, two things: a great enough expectation that such a life state is indeed possible to motivate us to seek the second thing, a reliable method for manifesting it. A method that, like weight lifting, if done correctly, would build not strength of muscle but strength of life force.
If such a life state isn’t possible, then we’re all doomed to have our happiness remain at the mercy of our changing environment, to gather to ourselves what external attachments we can and do our best to hide them from the purview of fate and circumstance, desperately hoping to avoid their loss even knowing eventually we will lose something critical to our happiness.
I know many people are resigned to believing this, but not me. One reason is that I’ve encountered patients who’ve lost spouses and even children who, though still carrying their sadness with them, have managed somehow not to be destroyed by it; who’ve not only learned to be happy again but even, in once case, to radiate joy. There’s something these people know that the rest of us don’t. But if they can learn it, so can we.
There’s ample reason to try. Each time my son has tripped and smashed his head on our maple wood floor, freezing my heart mid-beat, I’ve thought the same thing: we’re all born into constant danger, both ourselves and our loved ones. It may change its face as we age but never for one moment does it relax its grip. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could only develop a life state in which our worry over that danger ultimately became unimportant?
NEXT WEEK: How To Be A Leader
Like in the Alanis Morrisette song “You Learn,” everything is a lesson, and being biological creatures, change is undefferable. Some people tally up the good and bad and can become embittered; I prefer not to assign value to the events, and simply call them all lessons.
Having agency in this way, therefore, makes me happy.
I do like the idea of raising one’s life energy.
What a great post to start the day with!
I love these essays in which you apply a scientific methodology to engaging with the world of feelings. So many of us grow up believing that feelings are like the ocean; we can be lifted up by them but as easily dashed down or even destroyed. As a result, most of us are passive in the face of what feels like an overwhelming force against puny and impotent us.
As I have gotten older, I have come to see that our reality consists in what we are able to perceive, or the analogies we choose to describe what we see, not in some objective “truth” we apprehend perfectly through our senses. It takes an incredible amount of effort to imagine the possibility that emotions are NOT like the ocean, even if it feels exactly like that to us. But once we can admit this possibility (and I think of this like the movement from magical to scientific thinking) a world of options opens up. We get to choose how we are going to regard what we encounter, and we get to experiment to test whether the way we have chosen actually “works.”
I wish I had gotten to this point a lot earlier in life! But I think you hit the nail on the head when you suggest that allowing oneself to feel pain (grief) is a necessary precondition to escaping the passive condition—though no guarantee you will be wise enough to use it as a springboard!
Interesting thoughts. My son is 14 months, and I can definitely relate to the scared feeling when you think they are sick, and not knowing what’s going on. It’s scary…also scary to see how much you care for them, and how much power they start to hold over you…in a good way.
I saw a transformation from horrific grief to a joyful acceptance. My brother died at thirty from acute myoblastic leukemia. My mother became clinically depressed. This was 1966 and their were no antidepressants, grief couseling, support groups, etc. She started living again after about a year but her anger and sadness remained. But then she did something that I’ve seen many people in her situation do: she volunteered at the cancer research hospital where my brother died. Doing something meaningful in the face of loss does seem to help turn many people around. Eventually there was a level you didn’t mention. As the years passed she thought of my brother with joy; somehow she came to the point of not just acceptance, but with gratitude that he’d been part of her life. My aunt found some photographs of my brother as a child with a friend and I wanted to give them to my mother. My aunt thought they’d bring back painful memories. I knew better: my mother was ninety-three then and in a nursing home. When she saw the photographs she smiled and told me a story about my brother and his friend. She truly was at peace with her loss. She didn’t believe in an afterlife; that didn’t enter into it. I’ve never seen anyone reach this level. It has helped me enormously with the losses I’ve had. I know that it is possible to be at peace and have joy surrounding a profound loss. One of the greatest gifts I’ve been given.
I had an uncle who’s wife became sick. As he prayed and prayed outside her room he said that it suddenly hit him that prayer wasn’t the answer. God already knew what was going to happen, and so he prayed differently: “If it be Thy will please spare her, but not my will, but Thy will be done.” He was already mentally conditioning himself to let go if he had to. She lived, and a few years later he and his daughter were killed in a terrible plane crash. His wife remarried less than a year after that. I am sure that he taught her the necessity of grieving and moving on. They still left the legacy of a wonderful son who is now every bit as radiant as his parents. Pain and suffering are not noble. What matters is how you react to them. You can choose to become stronger and move on, which may sound “callous,” but that is what protects your life-force. If you sit festering and “blister” you will never heal and your old wounds will open up and drown your growth. Scars are the badges of life’s trials. Each one is a marker for a finished chapter of your life. All the rest is just window dressing, your book’s cover.
I don’t think you have to cling to happiness. Suffering is beautiful. I think it’s just another part of the spectrum. Another color in the rainbow.
Alex…you crack me up. Roseola!!! The minute I read high fever then a rash my non-doctor brain—but father of four kids brain—told me Roseola. Fortunately for me, I don’t have a doctor’s brain. I let my pediatrician do what he’s paid for. Unfortunately for you…you know too much. I think you should have a few more kids. Double your pleasure…double your fun…half you sleep time. Hugs…Tony
I’ve read a little about Buddhism, suffering, and attachment. I’ve also read about Taoism and for me the Ying Yang of Taoism is easier to grasp, i.e., you will have happy times and sad times with a mixture of both in each. The overall point being that everything is in constant flux, happiness is never infinite nor is sadness, so just deal with whatever comes up and remember that it will soon pass. No point in trying to “transcend” anything. Another great point of Taoism is to go with the flow of the Tao, like a river running that winds and bends over rocks, sticks, etc. Perhaps achieving your goal isn’t a straight shot but a roundabout route. Accept it instead of fighting and bemoaning that fact that things aren’t working out exactly as you planned. Easy to say, difficult to practice.
Isn’t it a bit selfish to put your own happiness above everything else? It is sometimes necessary for me to suffer and sacrifice for those few people I care about.
It’s selfish to put your own NEEDS and your own COMFORT above everything else. Happiness is not something you can create or affect. You just have to let happiness look after itself; it usually comes through self-sacrifice anyway.
I think that it is silly to complain about the pain of attachment to a loved one. We are as lucky as gods if we are attached. It’s one of the greatest joys of human existence. If it makes me cry sometimes, I don’t mind. I even feel privileged when I’m in a painful floods of tears. What’s worse than having no one to cry over?
A Painful Flood of Tears
Nothing grows without water.
The answer to attachment is surrender. We just need to allow ourselves to feel the attachment, to not have what we want desperately, or not be what we want to be. That doesn’t mean we don’t pursue what has value to us, but we can do it with a sense of perspective. We can know that something has value without being consumed by it. Nothing is worth investing our whole power in. This is different from tolerance where we just submit to our fate. The reason we attach is due to fear. We think that clinging to what we want will help us get it or keep it. But what we are really looking for is a sense of security. Security can only come from the knowing that we can take care of ourselves.
This is my point of view.
The pain I am talking about here is the emotional pain caused by the relationship with a friend or sweetheart, rather than by the death of a loved one or the break-up of your parents.
I ask you, why are you not willing to pay what it costs for the joy of attachment to another human being? The price is always a certain amount of pain, as the one you love will never do exactly what you want or need 100 percent of the time, leaving you upset/in bits/suicidal every so often. The pain is there for a good reason—that things suck sometimes. If you think you can avoid it, you are barking up the wrong tree and in danger of screwing up a beautiful relationship. Just take the damn pain and be grateful that you’ve got to suffer it. It is a happy kind of pain. Imagine having no relationships and no pain of attachment—that is called living death. I can’t believe that Buddhists are afraid of submitting to this bittersweet emotional trauma. Are you really that spoiled for company and human relationships? You seem to have no idea of the value of attachment. Imagine what it would be like to be truly alone, destitute and broken. Then you would put up with a lot of crap in order to gain a friend. If you reject the pain of attachment, you reject life.
Anyway guys, respect, thank you for submitting to my tongue-lashing. I welcome replies.
Please leave my grammar alone.
Having a sense of possible loss when your child was ill was one thing but had your child died not sure you’d be writing the same article and giving assessments to other people’s grief who have loved and lost. Yes we attach but we don’t attach with the prospect with losing always. I can only speak for myself. I think when one loves one’s child or spouse or partner or anyone with whom a person is truly close to, the grief can’t at that moment be just written off as “better days are ahead” or “chin up.” Grief should be respected and the lesson I have learned has been to love someone as much as you can for whatever time you have so that if in the event that something happens—be it an ending of any kind (not just death) then you can look back and think how you loved that person and have no regrets. Yes you may be happy again but forever there is a void—like looking at an old sepia photograph where people in the picture fade and life is like that, a continual blurring of places and people fading from the original picture.
Two days after Hurricane Katrina left my two kids and I homeless, I got a big lesson in attachment…and from an unlikely source, my 5 year old daughter. We were walking through a store in Georgia, and I fought back tears as we tried to find a map so we could navigate across the country and somehow find the rest of my family that had been scattered in the evacuation. My daughter looked up at me from the grocery cart, wiped a tear from my cheek and said, “It’s okay, Mommy…you know you can’t buy a new ME at Wal-Mart.” Suddenly I realized that all the things I mourned for were just that, things. Replaceable things. And it was that idea that somehow gave me the courage to keep going and remake a life for all of us. Now, looking back, that storm was the best thing that ever happened to me. I now have an amazing husband, a new life in a great city, and more than I ever dreamed of having! I truly believe that while we have no control over things that happen to us or around us, we have absolute control over the way we react to them.
“Suffer what there is to suffer. Enjoy what there is to enjoy. Regard both suffering and joy as facts of life…”
I stand corrected.
Thank you. I know I’m over something traumatic that happened to me. But sometimes, when I’m feeling a little bit lonely, I let it take a hold on me again, just because it’ll let this isolated moment of emptiness fit into a bigger theme…
[...] that’s exactly how it feels. The reason is simply this: as I wrote in a previous post, The Double-Edged Sword Of Attachment, the degree of attachment we feel for things has far less to do with the things themselves than [...]