letting go

Life is a training ground for how to let go. You may think it's about something else, but after you play those cards out, the thing you always return to is the need to let go, usually of whatever you were trying to get a hold of in the first place.

Let's say you get it. Enjoy it, but try not to get attached. The letting go is only painful if you develop the wrong kind of attachment to what you have. The wrong kind is defined by how unwilling you are to let go when the time comes.

The time always comes for letting go. That's why life is a training ground for it. No other outcome is possible for anything you have because life ends in death, which is itself a very large form of letting go, if you haven't done so already.

Some people have. More people will. They let go of their lives before their bodies force them to by expiring. It's called spiritual death. One simply dies to oneself. That which one can get for one's own sake altogether loses its luster and attraction.

Then you live in a constant state of letting go. You are the equivalent of exhalation. There is not even enough of you left to lament this transformation, and if there is, you simply let go of that sense of yourself also, because you know it isn't real.

The only people who contact reality at its deepest level are the ones who become that reality by letting go of everything else, including themselves. Then they can have anything at all and they don't stick to it. It doesn't stick to them. There's no having.

That reality is where suffering finally ends and lasting happiness and fulfillment become the natural by-product of simply Being. Alignment with that reality is the chief spiritual task of all human life, and it all gets there sooner or later, whether you like it or not.