About Detachment
Intro
I am reading the book Tuesdays with Morrie. I started it more out of boredom than genuine interest. I know why I downloaded it, and why I chose it1, but it is a fruit of chance that I selected that specific one and not another from my library of over 100 books.
I just read the chapter “The Sixth Tuesday: We Talk About Emotions”. It is a chapter so full of knowledge that I couldn’t simply extract the best quotes; I had to understand it, comprehend it, combine it with my own ideas, express it, and share it. Here is the result of that last step.
Life
The triggering phrase is: “Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live”2. How does dying feel? Knowing that this is your last day, your last hours; does it make it special? Precious? It’s like the last drops of Coca-Cola3; I don’t know why, but they always taste better than the rest of the soda. The fact that it is finite, that it is about to end, makes it much more special. If a soda provokes that effect, feeling that life is ending must be much more intense; those last moments, therefore, are the most precious.
But, do I really know when I am going to die? I understand that if I take care of myself and don’t suffer an unfortunate accident, my life expectancy is about 80 years. However, let’s remember that “the devil is in the details”; 80 years is my life expectancy only if “I don’t suffer an accident”. So, do I really know how much time I have left?
No, I don’t know. This means that my continuity in this world depends on chance. We can affirm without over-analyzing that “it is just as likely that I live tomorrow as it is that I die tomorrow”. Wow, writing that sentence gave me shivers; noticing your own mortality is a sensation of falling.
The Prison of Fear
If this could be my last day, what do I do? Do I take out loans like crazy and travel? Do I sell everything and go to the mountains to meditate? Do I tell them how I feel?
How many things do we keep silent because “it’s not the right time”? Because it’s better tomorrow, another day, next time, later. All those repressed, oppressed, and suppressed emotions hurt; you cannot repress an emotion, it always expresses itself4; it seeks a way to show itself. That anxiety, that trembling, fear, cold; they are repressed emotions. If you don’t listen to them, they scream at you. If you contain an emotion you won’t be able to move forward; you will be so busy being afraid that you will never be able to overcome that fear.
The Freedom to Be
So what do I do? Fear prevents me from overcoming it, and that impediment contributes to my fear—the vicious circle of the snake biting its own tail5. The answer is between the lines: “let go of that emotion”, or as Mitch’s professor says, “detach from it”.
If you immerse yourself in these emotions, allowing yourself to dive headfirst into them, all the way to the end, submerging your head even; you live in a full and complete way. You know what pain is, you know what love is, you know what the loss of a loved one is, and only then can you say: “Alright, I have lived this emotion, I recognize this emotion, now I need to detach from it”.
When you recognize the sensations of that emotion—its texture, humidity, the shiver, the suffocation of the brain—you are capable of recognizing it, and you can set it aside. To recognize an emotion is to let it go. Recognizing emotions, demonstrating them (I love you, I like you, I am afraid), frees you; if you repress them, they control you.
Feel the emotion, identify its effects on your body, let it flow, and then move on: “This is how loneliness/sadness/fear feels; now I am going to detach from it”.
Footnotes
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I usually download books related to philosophy, psychology, and science fiction. ↩
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Every day I am more surprised by how, in just a few words, a person can condense so much wisdom. ↩
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I don’t drink that soda anymore, but several years ago it was the only thing I drank. ↩
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That traditional idea that “A man just shuts up and moves on” is what makes men the ones who commit suicide the most. One day you just can’t take it anymore, and you explode. ↩
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Ouroboros. ↩