Lately I have been reading and learning a lot about letting go. About how attachments imply suffering. Living in the past or thinking too much about the future, both generate worryings on us and bring us unhappiness. So we must avoid all tha in order to reach happiness, or so we are told.
In an attempt to take the Buddhist philosophy to its maximum and mix it with our current carpe diem philosophy, where we look only for pleasure and wellness by living in the very present and not caring about any other thing, we have developed a tendency to avoid feelings in order to avoid getting hurt. It seems like giving too much, getting too involved or in general feeling too much when we are not sure about what is going to bring us and what is going to be result is certainly an unnecessary risk to suffer when the link is removed. Or maybe is our nature just creating expectations and expecting something in return for the feelings invested, for the effort, for the actions. Although we know we shouldn’t expect and we shouldn’t create an attachment, the truth is that we do.
The human being is emotional. I have no doubts about it. We feel and, most of the times, we hide those feelings to pretend strength. They are considered a weakness, they reveal too much. Other times, we pretend we don’t have them or we don’t care. Most of the times, we are scared of them. They constitute a part of us that yes, it is looking for the instant pleasure, the part where we get a good feeling from it. But also they get us too involved in something that will be our weakness, will make us feel too much and bring us uncertainty about what we are getting on in return, how things will end and of course, the suffering it will bring once this stimule is removed. We also remember past experiences that generally didn’t end up well for us and left us hurt and therefore, we reject and fight our own feelings in order to avoid the situation happening again.
This is the world we live in. Too scared to love free and openly. Too afraid of not getting anything in return or having our feelings hurt. Too many expectations are in place and we suffer when they are not met. So we avoid to give freely, to love freely. Is it worth it?
Instead of embracing our feelings we push them away, limiting ourselves because of the possibility of getting hurt. We give more importance to a possibility in the future than the actual present in the attempt to maximise the instant pleasure search. That keeps us from the rewards we could get and the marvellous feeling that love is, sentencing us to the miserable and ordinary because we were too scared.
Why don’t we just truly forget about the past and the future, live here and now? Give love, smile, feel the butterflies in your stomach…whatever it is, embrace it, feel it and take it. Because no matter how much pain it will cause in a future, it is always be worth it to feel intensely, to live intensely, to not be scared anymore.
Runaway Potion 