Sometimes what we have been thinking about almost immediately finds an echo in the world around us. Just yesterday, I was thinking about attachment and our inability to let go, and today I came across this text by Vatsla Singh. It resonated with me deeply.

As soon as I read it, a whole stream of thoughts began to form in response. I felt the need to write them down. And today, on the day of one of the most powerful eclipses of the year, it somehow feels important to speak about attachment, memory, and why it is so difficult for us to part with what we love.

Vatsla Singh:

“Ultimately, a life is measured as much by what we outgrow as by what we acquire. We outgrow people, circumstances, systems, practices, convictions, entire arrangements of life that once seemed permanent including even former versions of ourselves. And this is not some singular rite of passage reserved for youth alone or relegated to a certain great turning point only; for some of us, it happens repeatedly throughout a lifetime like an inescapable experience engineered into the very structure of our lives. Infact, what we call living may be, in part, the gradual practise of leaving things behind. Living, in that sense, therefore is a long education in the art of relinquishment. We spend our lives learning, reluctantly or otherwise, that very little was ours to keep. And perhaps the final instruction is that after a lifetime of letting go of one thing after another, eventually we must let go of the very factum of our lives too.”

And this is what came to me in response:

“How do you learn to let go when sentimentality and attachment to every manifestation of this vast, inexplicable, astonishing life lie at the very core of your being? I become attached to everything. Take yesterday, for example. A children’s celebration in a school in a small village of Dhomkhar in Ladakh. Girls wearing old family jewellery. The touching, funny faces of schoolchildren dancing. The attentive faces of their parents. The house where I am staying. The hands of the eldest woman in the family, carefully sorting through apricots. Their smell. The juice running from the fruit laid out to dry on the roof. And then an unexpected treasure. By chance, I discover that her husband paints thangkas. Behind a curtain made from an old piece of fabric, I find these extraordinary images. Fine lines. The serene faces of deities. The trace of a hand that has repeated the same movements for years.

The sound of a mountain river. The slender poplars that seem to be everywhere. Small green oases among almost barren mountains. Behind each of them lies an immense amount of human labour. Someone brought water here. Someone planted the first tree. Someone worked this soil for decades. And slowly, among the stones, life appeared. I want to remember all of it. I want to carry all of it with me. Every glance. Every gesture. Everything that feels real seems beautiful to me.

And beauty is elusive. It is always fleeting. Perhaps that is precisely what makes beauty beautiful to me. My heart trembles each time I try to hold on to these vanishing moments. Another manifestation of the divine in this world. Another form it has taken for a few brief seconds, only to disappear forever.

And I do not know how to free myself from attachment, because I am attached to everything. I try to preserve every memory. I take photographs. I write things down. I collect. I endlessly promise myself that I will stop bringing objects home from my travels, and yet I can never quite stop. I pick up an old string of bodhi-wood prayer beads. I see how worn the beads have become and think of how much love, faith and prayer have passed through them. And suddenly I cannot put them down. I pick up an old key that for decades opened some lock I will never know. I will never know which door it belonged to. Who carried it with them. Who came home in the evening and slipped it into the keyhole. Somehow, not knowing makes it even more precious. Keys have followed me throughout my life.

As if they were always reminding me of doors that are still waiting to be opened. I pick up a string of old shell prayer beads, and once again I realise that I cannot part with them.

And so, little by little, an enormous museum of memory grows around me. It feels as though by preserving these objects, I am also preserving moments that ended long ago. More and more flowers keep blooming in the garden of my memories. But the tragedy is that one person cannot tend such an enormous garden forever. Sooner or later, something has to be left behind. Something has to be forgotten. Something has to be lost. And perhaps this is where the hardest part begins.

I understand the idea of non-attachment. It is only by letting go that we become free. Life cannot be held onto. We cannot preserve every home, every encounter, every glance, every object. Everything appears and disappears.
And yet there is both immense beauty and immense tragedy in our human capacity for attachment. Sentimentality. Nostalgia. That uncontrollable desire to drift again and again through the currents of our own memory. To return to people who are no longer beside us. To houses we will never live in again. To smells, voices, touches. To chance moments that, for reasons we may never understand, have made a permanent home inside us.

Perhaps freedom does not necessarily mean ceasing to love all of this. Perhaps learning to let go does not mean learning not to become attached. It does not mean becoming indifferent to beauty out of fear that one day we will lose it.
Perhaps it means allowing your heart to tremble at every manifestation of life, without asking life to let any of it remain with you forever. To love. To remember. Sometimes to preserve. And still, to let things go. To release them… There is something beautiful, vulnerable and deeply, deeply human in our inability to ever fully learn how to let go.”

_{Frol Burimskiy}