Holding on Tightly

When I was a young lawyer, I was living with my sister. She had one of her law friends over for dinner. The friend was telling us about how her father had converted to Buddhism, and so she had been raised by a Buddhist.

So she would get home from school and say things like, “I was being bullied today.”

And he would ask “What’s the first noble truth? Life is suffering.”

We had a good laugh about it, but she did say that although it was tough at the time, but prepared her well for adulthood.

I was thinking about this recently when I was reading When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön. There’s a lot of Buddhist teachings in the book, but it’s been especially helpful through my last month, when things have been… busy.

The central premise of the book, in my opinion, is accepting what is.

Not trying to change what is, but accepting it as your default state. Chödrön says:

We are not trying to solve a problem. We are not striving to make pain go away, or to become a better person. In fact, we are giving up control altogether, and letting concepts and ideals fall apart.

One of the other interesting observations she made was that life is essentially a cycle of falling apart and coming together.

It is this falling apart that we seek to avoid, and yet it’s this falling apart that creates the space for us to come together more whole, more aligned and more authentic than before.

Another thing she says is, “when it hurts so bad, it’s because I’m hanging on so tight.”

This really resonated with me. I think that having just one older child, I was able to have a routine, and I like routines, and so I held tightly to the idea of my life looking like this.

And when all of a sudden you have two, and one of them is an infant, and its a pandemic, and a runny nose means you can’t go to daycare, life starts to look differently and you don’t have as much control over it.

And it’s time for me to let go, fall apart a little, so I can come back more whole, more aligned, and more authentic.

What are you holding onto tightly? It is time to let go?

Join us this week as we discuss this and more.

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