Six months before the pandemic, I was staying at a Buddhist monastery in the province of Mae Hong Son in Thailand learning about spirituality, consciousness and meditation, in the midst of a mountain, surrounded by the most beautiful landscape. I was reading a book from the monastery’s library, and I remember reading a statement that caught my attention: In Buddhism, it is believed that happiness and sadness emerge from the same source, from desire.
We clearly never expect two opposite feelings to derive from the same mental act, at least I never made that conclusion before. We start by desiring. When our desires are fulfilled we experience happiness, and when they are not, we generally experience sadness. And depending on the intensity of the desire, the emotion experienced in either scenario follows accordingly.
But then, how sure are we that whatever we desire is good for us? How many times have we desired something for so long, and after the short happiness of fulfilling the desire, we understand how bad of a decision it was. It could be a job we wanted for so long, a relationship, an object, and only after getting them do we understand that the job we wanted came with a toxic environment, that the relationship we wanted looked better in pictures than it did in reality.
One of my favorite verses of the Quran, the Muslim holy book, is the verse 2:216: “it is possible that you hate a thing which is better for you; and it is possible that you like a thing which is bad for you; and Allah knows, and you do not know.”
And since we can never be so sure that what we desire is good for us, we can actually learn to let go. Letting go does not mean to stop desiring, but means that our desires should not be absolute. It means that when our desires are not fulfilled, when our plans do not go as expected, we should trust that it is for the best, that while we could not obtain what we desired, what if we hadn’t really learned to desire right?
Sounds silly, right? But maybe the shape of the desire should be questioned, or reformed? I met a woman once who has been taking for 7 consecutive years the university teaching exam to become a professor, and was getting into a depression for not passing it. I asked her about why she was interested in becoming a university professor. It did take her more than a minute to think about it as she herself had forgotten her initial motivator, but after deeply thinking she answered: “theater has always been something I have been deeply passionate about and I always wished to one day become a professor so I can share that passion with students and help them achieve their goals.” The question we can ask here is, is becoming a university teacher the only way for the main desire, the end goal to be fulfilled?
Sometimes, we are so stuck at the “means” goal, that we forget why we desired it in the first place, we forget the end goal. And that as long as we are aware of the end goal and we let go of the desire to control how to reach it, we might be surprised with incredible gifts from the universe. In this case, the means goal is the teaching exam, the end goal is sharing the passion for theater with aspiring students.
By the end of our conversation, she left with a list of other paths that could lead her to achieve her end goal, from teaching at private drama centers to having her own establishment and working with people of different ages, kids as well as adults.
So what if we learned to be aware of the need we really are trying to fulfill and let go of expectations on how that should happen? What if you desired to travel abroad but the pandemic is stopping you? But actually, the reason you desire traveling is more because you are in need of meeting new people, and travel was the only way you did that before. And just for a second, you start thinking about ways to fulfill your need regardless of the borders closing?
So at least for me, learning to let go is also learning to set end goals, so I can leave my options open on how to achieve them. And when I try one of the means to reach my end goals and I don’t succeed, I am just confident that another means will be more suitable to me, and will bring me better fulfillment.
