Detachment

It’s a slightly rainy morning in Vientiane, Laos. I love the rain. Rainy days are good for contemplating deeper thoughts. I think it is part our biological makeup. It was not that long ago in human history that a rainy day meant we could not work; we were forced into our homes to wait for milder weather. Before the modern standard took over, a rainy day was a contemplation day. It was forced leisure time for deeper thoughts.

Rainy days also make me think of the Cat in the Hat. Cat in the Hat is a children’s story first brought to the animated screen during my youth. The story is of 2 children stuck at home on a rainy day who are visited by a mischievous cat. I can’t remember what they are looking for in the story (I think it was ‘something to do’), but the phrase “The way to find a missing something is to find out where it's not.” has always stuck with me. Throughout my life, the Cat in the Hat technique has made finding missing car keys, glasses, books and so on much more fun.

Today, on this slightly rainy morning, I want to mix my yearning for deeper thoughts with the Cat in the Hat technique in order to discuss a little bit more about detachment. Let’s talk about what detachment is not.

Detachment is not numbness. It is not a matter of tying a tourniquet around all feeling. Detachment is not making one blind; averting your eyes from the love and hate and smiles and tears around you. Detachment is not plugging your ears, deafening the world around you. Detachment is not a state of delusion where we create our own palatable reality and deny our perceptions. Detachment is not a number of things. Detachment is about opening your eyes seeing. It is about opening your ears and listening. It is about opening your heart and feeling. It is about perceiving a situation and accepting it for what it is.

I spoke about detachment briefly in the Insight post. In that post, I said detachment is the “practice of removing our own emotional agenda from a situation”. Reading this statement, a person might think the “situation” is about someone else. Often the “situation” is about our self. The situation may be your own internal dialog, your own thoughts, your own ambitions. When practicing detachment, you must learn to listen and see and feel without running the input through your emotional filter – the filter that impregnates our impressions with prejudice, favoritism, fear, desire, expectations.

It will take many more rainy days to fully cover the subject of detachment. It takes years – sometimes lifetimes – to actually practice detachment. For now, the two first steps should be enough to get started.

- Dismiss your emotional agenda from the situation
- Experience life without flavoring it with your own preconceptions

And don't forget to enjoy the rain! Today I will be going to a rocket festival, where the Laos people shoot off rockets to beckon rain to quench their crops.