Letting Go

I sat at my exclusive and expensive London club and exuded hypocrisy. 

I wondered whether I was small and insignificant enough to pass through the eye of a needle. 

It certainly felt that way, surrounded as I was by such haughty “elegance”, such excess, such a grandiose paeon to mammon.

A vulgar corporate event was in progress; “bizniss” people and their highly decorated (and decorative) womenfolk watched tennis.  Gorging themselves on hospitality  provided by the purveyors of overpriced and  foolish consumer goods.

Easy enough to talk about, letting go. And it can’t really be done unless you can pass through the eye of a needle.

So probably something the folk watching the tennis might find unacceptable.  And unnecessary.

But essential for anyone seeking true peace in an unforgiving world.

In reality how achievable is it?

Here I am in a first world nation.  No war, no natural disasters.  I am relatively well off, reasonably healthy; with a couple of roofs over my head and food on the table.

But I have not found it easy to let go. Of worry, of fear.  Insecurity for the future, guilt for the past.  Can I keep the lights on or will I end up sleeping rough on the streets of a pitiless nation.

Would somebody living below the breadline in a shanty town in some godforsaken African hellhole manage to let go?

I really don’t know the answer, although I suspect that those of a constitution and determination much stronger than my own, may manage to achieve equanimity living under even the most brutal conditions.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer comes to mind.

I cannot feel guilt for my own materially comfortable situation. Nor should I – what good would it do?  And if I did feel guilt, the modest material benefits I have been lucky enough to secure have been counter balanced by a lifetime of endless and debilitating depression. Well, you can’t have it all I guess.

My purpose however is neither to wallow in self pity, nor to decry (yet again) the piteous nature of the human condition.

This is a tale of success, a story of finding a path out of terror, even if the way is a narrow, slippery footpath cut across a sheer cliff face .  A misstep, a badly executed footfall and the rocks below are only too ready to receive this wary and fatigued traveller.

It has been a long, slow and difficult journey but the light has begun to glimmer at the end of my tiring, dark trek through the tunnel of Hades.

I choose to share my journey not out of any sense of pride or achievement, but to let people know that maybe it can be done.  That I have at long last managed to more or less let go, without holding onto the sides.

Whether my luck lasts, whether I get dragged back into the merciless Stygian gloom, who can tell.  But my state of mind has lasted quite a while now, and I am keeping my fingers resolutely crossed.

I am not a religious soul and yet I have found much wisdom in some of the world’s better traditions.

It’s all much of a muchness when you cut through the outdated beliefs and fanciful stories, and look instead at the practical proposals as to how we humans should live together. And treat each other.

Sharing, kindness and decency covers much of what we should aim for and as I gaze over at the bloated capitalists and their large cars, I think how much better our world would be without such greed and surfeit.

Equally importantly, I find a gentle humour in it.

Dust to dust, ashes to ashes.  How trivial is such excess, when in a short time we will be gone.

And while we are here, real wealth is to be found in our own minds and the appreciation of the glories and mystery of existence, not in the collection of baubles or in dominion over the weak.

True wealth is peace, a quiet mind. A blue sky, the beauty of birds and beasts.  Waves beating on a golden beach, blinding white snow on a high mountain pass.

Conversation with a learned old Sikh, listening to his sacred music, while he sells you computer equipment in his shop on Putney High Street.  Sitting in a cafe in the sun on some remote Greek island, sipping coffee while old men play chess and ancient women dressed in black brush their doorsteps.

True wealth is the acceptance of what we are, not striving to become something that we are not. True peace is to enjoy the natural world, not destroy it.  To reject struggle and greed, to live for the day, to exist without conflict or hatred or jealousy.

A warmth has come to me recently, a mellowness. A giving up, a snuffing out, a reconciliation. Above all an abiding peace which continues until and unless I make the mistake of getting sucked back into what most of us call life.

Although I’m getting better and wiser at avoiding such “life”.  Avoiding disputes, avoiding stress and grasping. 

Perhaps some of it is age. The end of the world as I have known it beckons, and I realise that I am only now managing to appreciate my existence and to live life as it should be lived.

Better late than never. 

I have always known how to live well but have only rather recently succeeded in doing so.

As a child I lived in Narnia (in my mind anyway) and Middle Earth.  As a young adult I spent time with Candide in his garden and sang psalms with Bede at Monkwearmouth – Jarrow.

Would that I had stayed there, but good that I have now returned, after years spent in a sterile wilderness.

Good to believe in compassion and empathy, in the beauty and mystery of the universe.

How little importance should we ascribe to the doings of men. How foolish are our wants, our ambitions, our empty vanities.

Only with an acceptance of our ephemeral nature, our impermanence and unimportance is it possible to truly let go.

To accept that our lives are little different to that of the sparrow in the Saxon hall brings a calm, a deep quiet to my soul.  A giving up of the struggle, a giving in to the inevitability of my eventual demise.

The present life of man, O king, seems to me, in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant. If, therefore, this new doctrine contains something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed. (Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Book 2, Chapter 13)