She Learned Nonattachment
She watched her husband drinking himself to death, destroying her family, her finances, their love.“You can’t do anything about him,” her best friend said.
“But you can change yourself.”When Elaine was first introduced to the concept of letting go—nonattachment—she thought it was something she was going to need to do only once or twice in her life. It was a difficult concept to grasp—how to love people, how to care, how to be intimately involved with life without clinging and holding on to people, places, and things.“At first I thought my husband was just a jerk and I needed to let go of only him. Twenty years have passed. The lesson has been ground into me. I’ve had to let go of him. My children grew up and left home. They had issues along the way. I’ve had to let go of them, too.“Slowly the message sank in. Letting go wasn’t something I needed to do just once or twice. My alcoholic husband was the vehicle to introducing me to nonattachment as a way of life.”“You can’t make him stop drinking, Melody, but you can go to Al-Anon.”“You can’t do anything about that—whatever that problem you can’t solve is—but you can go see a movie. Do something—anything—that feels good to you.”Sometimes I get like a dog with a bone. All I can see and focus on is the one thing I can’t do anything about, and I chew on it and gnash my teeth until I wear myself out. Part of letting go means switching our focus from trying to do the impossible to doing something we can do. It might not solve the problem, but it helps us relax and feel better while we wait and see how things work out.Sometimes the little things we do in life mean a lot.“The last years of my father’s life, I used to visit him and feel so bad that he was living alone,” a woman told me. ‘Aren’t you lonely?’ I’d ask him.“‘Honey, I’m in an intimate relationship with the world,’ he’d say.”Nonattachment doesn’t mean we don’t care. It isn’t something we do only when we’re breaking up with someone. It’s a way of life that can enhance all our relationships. And when we stop clinging so tightly to it—whether it’s a person, place, or thing—we often find we get a whole lot more back than we released.
From the book: Choices: Taking Control of Your Life and Making It Matter
