Don’t Get Too Attached to Non-Attachment

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Once upon a time there was an old man who used to walk down to the well to fetch water for his family. On his left side he held a brand new shiny bucket. On his right side was an old bucket with cracks and holes in it. When he brought home water from the well, the left bucket would retain all the water he had started with, while the right bucket would lose water as he walked to the point that there was very little water left when he got home, if any at all. One day the right bucket looked at the old man and said, ‘listen, I’m a terrible bucket. I leak water everywhere and I think it’s time for you to retire me.’ The old man looked at the bucket and asked him to look down the path that they traveled together every day. As the right bucket looked down the path, he noticed that one side was paved with gravel while on the other side there bloomed flowers and vegetables and vegetation of all kinds. The bucket was perplexed and the old man looked at him and said, ‘I’m aware of your leaks and I’m aware of your cracks. I have been for some time now. So on the side of the path that we walk back from the well together I have planted seeds. Your leaks have grown flowers for my wife and vegetables for my children.’ And with this the bucket was happy. The bucket realized that it is not just our virtues and successes that shape the world around us, but our failures and our sadness and that no matter how bad things may seem, we can keep on walking down the path regardless of if we are carrying water or water flowers.

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This is a nice little story I heard on a live album from John Craigie in between sets. He shares that he actually received The Parable of the Buckets from the back of a Chipotle wrapper, proving once again that wisdom and divinity can be found just about anywhere if you open your eyes to it.

A recent struggle of mine has been with the idea of non-attachment. I say recent because I’ve become exceedingly aware of it lately, but really I’ve been struggling with the concept since the day I began to learn about Buddhism. Buddhist scripture starts out by stating some truths about the universe that we live in. These are called The Four Noble Truths and read as such. All life is suffering. The cause of suffering is attachment. You can free yourself from suffering through the art of detaching. The art of detaching can be achieved by following The Noble Eightfold Path.

This is a stark contrast to the Catholicism that I grew up with in which you recognize your immortal soul and then pledge that soul to Jesus. If you look at Christianity for what it started as, which is as a Jewish heresy, you’ll notice that the Judeo-Christian world does in fact put quite the emphasis on the individual and their individual relationship with God and divinity, very different than a Buddhist or a Taoist recognizing that their life is just a tiny part in the unfathomable universe that is constantly swirling around them. In this way, non-attachment has intrigued and unsettled me.

Consider for a moment the ideals of western culture, specifically capitalism. You are educated, enter the workforce and then toil for years to create wealth and a name for yourself. The work you do now will benefit you in the future and you are constantly growing this ideal of what it is to be you that is so closely linked to the work that you do. This doesn’t sit well with the idea of non-attachment. Setting a goal of a specific yearly income only leads to suffering. You either don’t make it and you are disappointed, or you do make it and then later find out that the happiness you experienced from this achievement is short lived at best and the struggles that are inherent in the art of living continue to come whether you got the fancy new house in the hills or not.

This is not the way to enlightenment.

Also consider the way that we as a culture look at and consider familial relationships. We certainly mourn the loss of our loved ones and a common saying at a funeral or wake is ‘sorry for your loss.’ The attachment we feel to the one who has passed increases our suffering. The more we loved them, the harder the hurt. The same can be said of relationships. Marriage, a staple in our culture, is both a religious and financial ceremony where we attach ourselves to another person and say things like, ‘til death do us part,’ verbalizing an attachment for all those around us to see. These attachments that we create are fleeting as one way or another, they will come to an end.

So it would seem that the quest for non-attachment can save you from a lot of suffering (score one for Buddhist philosophy!), but the road you take to get there is not an easy one, and can be full of suffering itself.

My search for non-attachment begins internally, and I guess the best place to start is by debunking it as ‘my’ search, because who am I and what do I actually own here? A lot of people get tripped up on this thought, but consider for a minute that right now at this very moment, I am the speaker and you are the listener. Consider then that if this were a conversation, very shortly we would switch roles in the game and I would listen while you speak. So Kevin the listener and Kevin the speaker are two different roles that I can flow seamlessly in and out of. This doesn’t seem to change the core concept of who I am as Kevin, but if you dig a little deeper I’m sure that we can find the holes in the argument for Kevin.

We could say Kevin is a spiritually inclined good person who works as a physical therapist and writes on the weekends. Well, what happens to that idea when I do something mean to someone? What happens when I don’t write on the weekends? Is Kevin still there? I think if you continue down the road with this manner of questioning, you’ll find that what we think of as ‘Kevin’ is shaky at best.

Yet, I will admit that there is something that feels constant in me on a day to day basis. I can’t really put a word to it but there is something there. This something leads me to my place in relationships. I have loved my family members, close friends and partners. I feel deep-seated connections to them somewhere in what I guess I would call my soul, and they truly do feel like good things. But when someone walks away from one of these connections, through death or other circumstances, the suffering is great. We live in a world where time is a constant and it is relentless. That realization can at times be unbearable, yet we continue on because what else are we going to do? This suffering is self-inflicted by my own attachments and unbefitting of someone who is trying to walk the middle path.

On the first night of Lightning in a Bottle Music Festival this year, I attended a Cacao ceremony. The woman leading was a well-respected protector of the rights of Indigenous peoples. She had spoken at the United Nations and gently commanded respect from her audience who mostly did not know her and needed a translator to understand her. It turns out that for this specific Cacao Ceremony, we would be saying goodbye to a spiritual leader who had spoken at the last festival but had since transitioned to whatever comes next. You could tell that the people offering the ceremony to him really cared. One of the elders who sang and beat a medicine drum while the cacao was prepared, offered up this wisdom as they said goodbye to Uncle Pedro.

‘When we lose those we love, we grieve. And we remember.’

They were very simple words, but powerful nonetheless.

While offering energy work at the same festival, I performed reiki on another energy healer. When I arrived at her heart chakra, I could tell that she was holding on to something there and I asked her to let it go. When we came back around to the heart chakra a second time, it seemed like she was forcing it open. Instead, I offered that she might simply let it open, and she did so beautifully. She was so incredibly aware of her energy and what she should be doing to heal that she was not allowing herself the actual space to heal, or at least that is how I interpreted her… and maybe also how I interpret myself.

The spiritual path is a funny one.

You walk it long enough and you think you know a thing or two. You may think that you’ve leveled up in some respect and that you will no longer feel some of the not-so-good feelings that those mere mortals and the start of the path have to deal with. But that is not what I have found. I’ve found that it is merely an awareness that you begin to possess, and this awareness does not help you to skip steps in the process. Instead you may get a sense of joy in the process, and I wouldn’t necessarily say that you’ll find joy in your grief, but you’ll find a sense of beauty in feeling the feeling — all of the feeling.

In a roundabout way, my practice this weekend allowed me to lose my attachment to non-attachment. It gave me permission to sit and grieve and remember without thinking that I should have, or could have, avoided those feelings all together. And who knows how many flowers I watered with those feelings.

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