Loss, Forgetting and Acceptance
Forgetting the past, accepting the future and embracing the present: 2023 Christmas Edition.
"That loss is common would not made
My own less bitter, rather more:
Too common! Never morning wore
To evening, but some heart did break."Alfred Tennyson
I was lucky, this past Christmas. I spent it, for the first time, with my partner's nephew. He has dark hair, is two years old and had a very good day. He was particularly pleased with a toy elephant that he received, and played with it so eagerly that the other presents seemed not to exist at all. The food was lovely. My partner's family were swell. We even had a swim in the humid afternoon. It was a delightful day that left my partner and I feeling delighted. On the drive home, we listened to Songs of Leonard Cohen and my partner closed her eyes and rested. Amongst Cohen's gloomy contemplation, a theft occurred. I realised suddenly that all those lovely moments were gone, never to be experienced again. In fact, even in the moment, just as soon as I'd realised I was watching something special; a young boy unwrapping an elephant with glee, it was transforming into the moment that replaced it. Everything was here and then it was gone.
My mind grasped for methods of capture and settled on photographs and journalling. That way, I thought, I could imprison the pleasant moments. Written down or caught in film, they'd be forever in my possession for me to enjoy them on demand. I wanted to hoard life, as Oliver Burkeman puts it, making myself miserable by craving experiences I wasn't having and "by trying too hard to hold onto the good experiences" that I was currently experiencing. But, as he explained with the help of J. Jennifer Matthews, life is for living, not for hoarding. Matthews wrote in her book, "we cannot get anything out of life. There is no outside where we could take this thing to. There is no little pocket situated outside of life” where we could take “life’s provisions and squirrel them away.” So what should we do?
"Grief and disappointment give rise to anger, anger to envy, envy to malice, and malice to grief again, till the whole circle be completed."
David Hume
The positive experiences I was trying to capture are not only thwarted by my attempt to squirrel them away but also by the immediate recognition that I can't. As the moments slipped through my fingers I felt Hume's cycle begin to whir. I became disappointed. Grasping at experience was a retraction from the very thing I was trying to get more of; life. Rather than advancing towards it or forming a deeper appreciation of it, I was underlining the lost present moment by losing another in my bemoaning of the previous lost present moment. If we want to move towards life and actually experience it, rather than snatch and grasp at it, then we need to change our expectations and break the cycle that Hume is referring to.
"Do you want to know what my secret is? I don’t mind what happens."
J. Krishnamurti
Disappointment is always born from expectations. If I expect to be able to extract perfect moments and relive them, well I'm setting myself up for a bitter little Christmas. Instead we need to practice acceptance and, in a strange way, forgetting. While forgetting is to let go of the past, acceptance is to let go of imagined futures and accept the one that arrives.
"Future love does not exist. Love is a present activity only. The man who does not manifest love in the present has not love."
Leo Tolstoy
If we feel in ourselves any negative emotion, it is because we're resistant. Greed, grief, rage and righteousness are all resistance to the present moment as it is. We set expectations (I hope to taste a delicious pudding and custard), they are not met (I'm tasting a disgusting pudding and there isn't even any custard), we react with resistance (This pudding is shit and I feel bad). Often this resistance begins a plot, an attempt to manufacture the future according to our desires. Maybe if I smell every pudding before I eat it, then I'll never eat a bad pudding again… The future becomes something we can get more out of, something where acorns might be found and taken away to our lair of pleasant moments. The antidote to our resistance is acceptance. In fact, the two cannot coexist in any single moment. So if we take a step back and examine our experience, as it is, and then welcome it, including the pain or disappointment, our resistance must melt away. Our expectations, how things "should" be, will be replaced by how things are, a state of affairs that we've already made peace with.
"To forget the years, to forget righteousness, to forget wisdom and to forget distinctions, this is to be transformed into the infinite Tao."
Forgetting the future and forgetting the past are the two sides of presence. Journalling and taking photos to capture the moment robs you of at least two moments; the moment of photographing and the moment(s) of remembering. It might sound harsh to renounce memories wholesale. I don't want to convey that I think they're especially harmful or destructive. The problem with remembering is that it pits moments against one another. Competition between moments is a futile event that only brings about disappointment, a disappointment that doesn't need to be there. Remembering also trades the present moment, as it is, for a shoddy reconstruction of a past one. It is futile to search for peace and happiness in a memory of a time already lost. Instead, it is the present moment, lived with our full attention, where the Tao, the Godhead, real peace and overflowing joy rest, waiting for us. It is here. Now.
"The perfect man uses his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing. It regrets nothing. It receives but does not keep."
Zhuangzi
So as 'significant' moments arise and pass away, we should let them come and go. We should watch our mind and accept all that it brings. Nerves, anticipation, excitement, ecstasy, awkwardness, melancholy, loneliness, rest; it is all a river that flows before us. We cannot 'take the water prisoner' or 'seal the river at its mouth', as Townes Van Zandt wrote. We cannot even take what we want and discard the rest. Grief is the price we pay for love. It is all one dream and we have no place to take our favourite parts to. Our time in the dream is warm but it is short. We will pass through here in a flash, gone forever like like tears in rain or ashes in the wind. We should receive and forget, letting the river flow freely past us. When we watch ourselves and see a happy moment, when we catch ourselves enjoying our given life, we can declare in the spirit of Uncle Alex, "if this isn't nice, I don't know what is."
“The clouds above us join and separate,
The breeze in the courtyard leaves and returns.
Life is like that, so why not relax?
Who can stop us from celebrating?”Lu Yu
W.
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