learning to detach

This is an excerpt I really like from the book Tuesdays with Morrie. The book is about Morrie, a professor who in the last moments of his terminal illness imparts his lessons on life and living to one of his students. We have a tendency to fight strong emotions. We all crave drama but when it comes to real emotions, we shy away from them because we're afraid. I think most of the time the reason we're afraid of these emotions is because we feel like if we give in, we'll lose control. Morrie advises Mitch, his student, to just go with the emotions, as they come, to let go, to live them fully... and then, to detach from them.
We want to feel the emotions... but not too much. The problem is that when you keep fighting the emotions, they get bottled up and eventually they burst out of you at the wrong time and in the wrong form. Accepting that at a certain moment you feel a certain emotion, experiencing it completely .... but keeping in the back of your mind the awareness that you are in control, that this is a natural emotion, it has come.. and it will go - when youre ready - allows you to live it fully and then, to let it go and move on. It allows you to regain control and not to be a slave to your emotions.

The small horrors of his illness were growing, and when I finally sat down with Morrie, he was coughing more than usual, a dry, dusty cough that shook his chest and made his head jerk forward. After one violent surge, he stopped, closed his eyes, and took a breath. I sat quietly because I thought he was recovering from his exertion.

“Is the tape on?” he said suddenly, his eyes still closed.

Yes, yes, I quickly said, pressing down the play and record buttons.

“What I’m doing now,” he continued, his eyes still closed, “is detaching myself from the experience.”

Detaching yourself?

“Yes. Detaching myself. And this is important – not just for someone like me, who is dying, but for someone like you, who is perfectly healthy. Learn to detach.”

He opened his eyes. Exhaled.

“You know what the Buddhists say? Don't cling to things, because everything is impermanent.”

But wait, I said. Aren’t you always talking about experiencing life? All the good emotions, all the bad ones?

“Yes.”

Well, how can you do that if you’re detached?

“Ah. You’re thinking, Mitch. But detachment doesn’t mean you don’t let the experience penetrate you. On the contrary, you let it penetrate you fully. That's how you're able to leave it.”

I’m lost.

“Take any emotion for example - love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on the emotions - if you don’t allow yourself to go all the way through them - you can never get to being detached. You're too busy being afraid. You're afraid of the pain, you are afraid of the grief. You are afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails. But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, "All right.i have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now i need to detach from that emotion for a moment."

Morrie stopped and looked me over, perhaps to make sure I was getting this right.
“I know you think this is just about dying, “ he said, “but it’s like I keep telling you. When you learn how to die, you learn how to live.”

Morrie talked about his most fearful moments, when he felt his chest locked in heaving surges or when he wasn’t sure where his next breath would come from. These were horrifying times, he said, and his first emotions were horror, fear, anxiety. But once he recognized the feel of those emotions, their texture, their moisture, the shiver down the back, the quick flash of heat that crosses your brain- then he was able to say, “Okay. This is fear. Step away from it. Step away.”
I thought about how often this was needed in everyday life. How we feel lonely, sometimes to the point of tears, but we don’t let those tears come because we are not supposed to cry. Or how we feel a surge of love for a partner but we don’t say anything because we're frozen with the fear of what those words might do to the relationship.

Morrie’s approach was exactly the opposite.Turn on the faucet. Wash yourself with the emotion. It won’t hurt you. It will only help. If you let the fear inside, if you pull it on like a familiar shirt, then you can say to yourself, “Alright, it’s just fear, I don’t have to let it control me. I see it for what it is.”

Same for loneliness: you let go. Let the tears flow, feel it completely – but eventually be able to say, “All right, that was my moment with loneliness, I’m not afraid of feeling lonely, but now I’m going to put that loneliness aside and know that there are other emotions in the world, and I’m going to experience them as well.”

“Detach,” Morrie said again

[….]

Finally, in a whisper, he said, “I know how I want to die.”

I waited in silence.

“I want to die serenely. Peacefully. Not like what just happened.

“And this is where detachment comes in. If I die in the middle of a coughing spell like I just had, I need to be able to detach from the horror, I need to say, “This is my moment.”

"I don’t want to leave the world in a state of fright. I want to know what’s happening, accept it, get to a peaceful place, and let go. Do you understand?”

I nodded.

Don’t let go yet, I added quickly.

Morrie forced a smile. “No. Not yet. We still have work to do.”