“The Buddha approached suffering differently. He said that suffering is not inherent in the world of impermanence; suffering arises when we cling. When clinging disappears, impermanence no longer gives rise to suffering. The solution to suffering, then, is to end clinging, not to try to escape from the transient world.”
The areas of my life in which I cling to things are few. But the places in which I do are horrendously difficult to overcome.
I do not cling to material things. Everything I “possess” I can (and have, and could easily again) leave sitting or given away.
I do not cling to spiritual things. My attachment to a particular belief or thought is like water. The beliefs I hold today rose from beliefs I held and have set aside, and every bit of it is shifting and changing from moment to moment without suffering for any of it.
Emotionally, well, that’s another story. Emotionally, I am still a needy child… frustrated for it, frankly. There was a serious break at a very pivotal point in life for me and I simply have never recovered. I begin to wonder if I can.
I am forever afraid of people leaving, and every instance of having someone do so only drives the thorn deeper. Since even a normal life is filled with people coming and going, you might imagine how deep that thorn rests these days. The circumstances of my life to date have sent me careening along a path wherein, both by my nature and its juxtaposition with the rest of the world, abandonments are not only commonplace, but practically predictable. The thorn is in my heart and has been so as long as I can recall.
I keep saying I am not going to let it bother me anymore. But I cannot get past the saying to the doing. I find it rather pathetic of myself. I cannot go a week without contact from someone but that I begin wondering ‘what i’ve done wrong’ and ‘if they are ever going to return’ and ‘why did they leave me’.
If they do return, i am resentful that they were gone, but also redouble my efforts to try and insure they will not do so again. If they do not return, I fall into grief and despair and am hard pressed to stop thinking about it…. flaying myself with imagined mistakes that drove them away.
Of course the worst part is that I see this and know what it is and why it happens and I do it time and time and time again… I still cannot seem to do more than this.
Do I really need to say how hopeless it feels to be pushing forty three years of age and be no further along toward a healing of this, the most ancient wound?
Instead, I seem to repeatedly put myself into situations where the likelihood of it happening again is probable to the point of a certainty. It’s like I’m trying to challenge myself by repeats to ‘get over it’. It is not always conscious choice, which is also perturbing to me. I see the pattern in a relationship and just want to curl up and bawl like a baby. ‘Oh, look, here, I’ve done it again.’
It seems the only time I do not have the same result is when I completely withdraw. I have been fighting against that being the only real ‘solution’ for over twenty years. I have been insisting that it doesn’t have to be that ‘black or white’. That surely, I can manage to find the happy medium that will allow me to enjoy the company of others without enabling the same behaviors in myself or in them to the same ends.
It has not happened yet. The only true remedy to date is shutting out the world. Shutting off. Pulling away.
I do not like that this seems the only cure for things. But in light of the recent circumstances turning to the same ends despite my exquisitely slow, careful, and dedicated effort to nourish a different outcome, I have to admit it…. I do not think I can do this anymore.
In fact, I’m certain of it.
I suppose to some, it may well seem as if the choice I am making is not different than ‘trying to escape from the transient world’. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have finally accepted the thing that has been gnawing at my mind, heart, and spirit… and rather than shudder and quail in front of it, I’m just going to embrace it and let it be what and as it is.
I am meant to be alone. There is no other reasonable conclusion to be had from this lifetime of solitude and abandonments.
No matter how I have tried, what I have done, no matter how much I give or how much I bend, it is always the same. I think it is time I accepted it, don’t you?
Maybe by finally doing so, I can get my mind off of all the things I have always felt I’ve been missing and get along with living life without the weight of that missing sitting on my mind like a lead sombrero. It is said the first step to liberation is to accept that all one has is what is in this moment. I do not know why I have tried to fight it for this long. Stubbornness, I suppose.
But it ends here. Now. I have always been alone. I will always be alone. This is what is.
I accept it.