What Is
“Letting Go”?
“Letting go” literally means releasing your close or
tight fist in order to abandon or give up something that you are holding in
your hand. If you are close- or tight- fisted, you also cannot receive
anything. “Letting go” is detachment.
The opposite of “letting go” is “attaching to” something
that you are stubbornly holding on to.
To live well, you need to ask yourself many self-probing questions as you continue on your life journey in order to find
out: who you really are, and not who you think or wish you were; what
you really need, and not what you want from life; why certain
undesirable things happened while certain desirable things did not
happen to you. Without knowing the answers to those questions asked, you can
never be genuinely happy because you will always be looking for the unreal and
the unattainable, just like the carrot-and-stick mule forever reaching out for
the unreachable carrot in front.
In many ways, the human brain is like a computer
program. Your whole being is like the computer hardware with the apparatus of a
mind, a body, and its five senses. The lens through which you see yourself, as
well as others and the world around you, are the software that has been
programmed by your thoughts, your past and present experiences, as well as your
own desires and expectations. In other words, it is you—and nobody else—who have programmed your own mindset. All these
years, you may have been trapped in a constricted sense of the self that has
prevented you from knowing and being who you really are. That is to say, your
“conditioned” thinking mind may have erroneously made you "think" and
even "believe" that you are who and what you are right now; but
nothing could be further from the truth.
By asking relevant questions, you may have the human wisdom
to "change" that pre-conditioned mindset, and thus enabling you to
separate the truths from the half-truths or even the myths that you may have
created for yourself voluntarily or involuntarily all these years.
What Are Attachments?
An
attachment is basically your own emotional dependence on things and people that
define your identity, around which you wrap your so-called “happiness”, and
even your survival. Attachment is holding on to anything that you are unwilling
to let go of, whether it is something positive or even negative.
An
attachment is no more than a safety blanket to overcome your fear—fear of
change and fear of the unknown from that change. To cope with that fear, all your
attachments become your distractions.
We are
living in a world with many problems that confront us in our everyday life, and
many of them are not only unavoidable but also insoluble. To overcome these
daily challenges, many of us just turn to attachments as a means of distracting
ourselves from facing our problems head on, or adapting and changing ourselves
in an ever-changing environment.
All our
struggles in life, from anxiety to frustration, from anger to sadness, from
grief to worry—they all stem from the same thing: our attachment to how
we want things to be, rather than relaxing into accepting and embracing
whatever that might happen after we have put forth our best effort.
Given
that attachment is closely related to the thinking mind: how it processes life experiences, it is therefore important to
know and to understand the different phases of life.lo, such as the development phase, the transitional phase, the consolidation phase, and the letting-go phase.
The Letting-Go Phase
With
advancement in age, and as age begins to take its toll on the body and the
mind, most of the life habits that control how they should live have become
well established. Their thoughts, based on decades of their past experiences,
now dominate their thinking, and hence control how they live the rest of their
lives. At this point, it may be difficult, if not impossible, to alter the way
they process their experiences and perceptions—just as the saying goes: “It is
difficult to teach an old dog new tricks.”
In this
final phase in their lives, unfortunately, they have to learn letting go,
whether they like it or not. Everything begins to slip away from their lives:
their youth, their health, and inevitably their minds too.
All in
all, how the mind processes experiences and perceptions determines the
type of person you are and will become. The happenings in your life are real,
but the way you process and perceive them may positively or
negatively affect your life because they are stored in your subconscious mind,
which may either give you valuable life lessons, or create delusions and
self-deceptions that may not only confuse you but also lead you astray. True
human wisdom, therefore, plays a pivotal role in how the thinking mind
processes all life experiences and their respective expectations.
It is in this final phase that you must learn how to let go of anthing and everything in order to live the rest of your life as if everything is a miracle.
Stephen Lau
Copyright© by Stephen Lau
