Once again, being in the mutilating between of crossroads, one that travels opposite directions of believing and the other of distrusting, averts the motion of prolonged felicity. It is not the fault that defines the righteousness of accumulated matters, the corrective changes are. Keeping my chameleon facade would not escalate the improvement scale of grotesque of events that incline the disbelieving.
Albom's reads have always been lesson enriching and bitter sweetly apt, about the hardest trials humans struggle through all their lives, regardless of the types of people they are altogether, or individually if you may have it placed. An extraction was rediscovered upon a visit to my sister's blog, which I felt, is personally consoling to read. Never have I been good at detaching once I'm drawn into any form of affinity, but that is what seems to be the pattern of requirement of me whenever I get attached. No doubt, there is dangerously thin rope between attachment and detachment, and what strikes most worrying is the extreme of both alternatives.
A preacher spoke of God, promises, and withdrawn promises. How do you write, if you do not read in between lines. How do you gain wisdom and muse, if underlying messages are never decoded. I am lost, and I feel the part of this small frame of body. I will try praying this night that glimpses hope. And tonight I pray that nobody who loves, would get hurt or betrayed. I pray with a skeptic of a heart and to contradict, with a tightened and clenched fist, but nevertheless, I'm trying to seek that spiritual solace. I pray for the desperation to search for a direction.
I am a city that has been terrorised, I am the plane that has crashed, I am the debris of a disaster's aftermath, I am the noise to your balance, I am the love-hate nicotine in your lungs, I am the starless blank of your skies, I am the red sunset of your ominous cliches, I am the silence to your gentleness and the anger in your hands, but I am the girl who will always love you the most. I am not perfect, but I have thus far never stopped trying to be all I can for you.
"Take any emotion -- love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I'm going through, 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're afraid of the grief. 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 experienced that emotion. I recognise 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."
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. If you let the fear inside, if you pull it on like a familiar shirt, then you can say to yourself, "All right, 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.
by Mitch Albom