Embrace and Detach

"What I'm doing now... 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... You know what the Buddhists say? Don't cling to things, because everything is impermanent."

But wait, 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... But detachment doesn't mean you don't let the experience penetrate you. On the contrary, you like it penetrate you fully. That's how you are able to leave it."

I'm lost.

"Take any emotion - love for a women, or grief for a loved one... 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're afraid of the greif. You're 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 experience that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment.'"

-tuesdays with Morrie, by Mitch Albom pg 103-104



I somehow learned that love was one of the greatest feelings and emotions on earth and that if I loved, I would be loved in return. But this is also how I have come to know "goodbyes" so thoroughly as well. I have been so blessed in my life with the people who've I've encountered through the years and who I've established long and deep friendships with. I think someone was watching out for me. Perhaps I didn't realize it but it would give me the support I would need when the good byes got to be too much for me to bear on my own. I haven't ever had to break up with many people, but I have had to say my fair share of goodbyes.

Goodbyes weren't so hard before. I'd embrace it and feel it, cry and hug those I was leaving. Promising to keep in touch even though it was difficult, we still try. But at least most of those moments during the time we had with each other helped create a great relationship that would let me come back and pick up where we left off. So the goodbye would come, but I knew there would be more moments of love and joy. I let myself love people as completely as I could because the returns are always greater and it's so much easier to trust and love than be bitter and mean. I guess I was addicted because for my whole life, the more I gave love the more I received it. You couldn't go wrong. Even the goodbye's still couldn't stop me from loving.

It helped because I still had my own source of never ending love from my family, parents, brother, cousins, aunts, uncles, "aunts", "uncles", long time family friends, etc. My parents love for their children helped raise happy, loving kids who learned to give to others and to love others. I learned to see people for who they are and for loving them for who they are. Things were wonderful and I almost had the perfect family. But then one of those sources, a major one, my mother passed away. Suddenly it's become harder and I felt I couldn't love like I did before, but I was wrong. I still do, but what's changed now is how I deal with goodbye's.

I'm still trying to learn how to grieve. I don't want to hang onto this anymore, I've let myself cry, but yet it still doesn't seem to be enough. Will I be crying for the rest of my life? My friend did some research to help me after my mom passed and she read that although it seems like I'm spirling downwards, it's really just me letting go more and more. So I've taken that advice to heart and I'm trying to get it out. I know I'm lucky I have safe people to cry to, who will let me cry and who I can share my pain with, but it still feels like never ending pain. Especially when new goodbye's come up, it feels like new pain layered on old pain. Suddenly I'm back in a whirlwind of feelings of pain, hurt, loss... I've got the embracing the emotion part down... but how does one detach and leg it go?

What's going to happen in the future if I can still love, but I can't let go of my goodbye's.