Detachment…
Greeting dear friends & fellow navigators, & welcome to my world this week. No feeling you have ever had is permanent. Not the soul-crushing dread of a Sunday night. Not the height of a win you thought was impossible. They all pass. The joy & the sadness, & everything in between.
Poet Rainer Maria Rilke could not be more correct when he said, “Let everything happen to you: beauty & terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
It is the most brutally practical operating system for life I have ever found.
Sometimes people get so stuck, they face anxiety so bad they freeze. They convince themselves this is their new default setting. We can feel joy, & we hold onto it, terrified of its inevitable end. We are terrible at just letting the emotion be exactly what it is: a passing cloud.
What if you stopped doing this? What if you just let life pass through you? The terror & the beauty. The heartbreak & the surprise. You do not have to like it, rather just to acknowledge it is temporary. The bad meeting, & the rejection email. They feel like a verdict on your entire existence. Conversely, they are not.
They are an event. A feeling. It will be replaced by another one, probably before lunch. Emotions are not facts.
“Just as thoughts are not facts, feelings are not facts either. Emotions are information, but when this information is powerful, intense & loud, as emotions can be, then we are more vulnerable to believing in them as a true reflection of what is going on. One feels therefore it must be a fact. Emotional reasoning is a thought bias leading us to use what we feel as evidence for something to be true, even when there is plenty of evidence to suggest otherwise.” 1
Any single experience does not & should not define your entire life. You had your heart broken? Feel it. Really feel it. Let the terrible, beautiful ache of being human wash over you. Then, because you must walk the dog or make dinner, you just keep going. The feeling has not disappeared. But you have moved, & this movement changes everything.
I apply this like a rule. Sometimes a wave of imposter syndrome takes over my head mid-project. Old me would have quit for the day, defeated. Now? I literally say, “Okay, this is a feeling. It is not final. I will feel different in an hour”, & I do.
The project is not the problem; my temporary fixation on it is. The feeling passes. All feelings do. My job is just to keep my feet moving until the scenery changes. I am not saying avoid pain. Rilke’s wisdom is the secret of engagement. 2 Say yes to all of life. But do not get attached. The beauty is just as short as the terror, so you had better be paying attention when it is passing.
Whatever you are going through, keep going. It is the only sane thing to do.
Just keep going. Be like the curious traveller. The path ahead is not defined by the pothole you could not avoid or the gorgeous view you stopped to admire. The path is just the path. Your only job is to take the next step. The feeling inside you will always change.
Become the “observer.” A decision to feel it all without letting any of it become “you”, changes everything. Just few observations again dear friends & provide an opinion in my world. Thank you for stopping by, I appreciate your being here. If my journey encourages you also, all is well with my soul. Looking forward to next week; this is Kenn Butler in Paradise, Nelson with best wishes.
1 Dr Julie Smith is a clinical psychologist with over a decade of professional experience. She is also an online educator & social media star
with a following of more than 3 million. Julie Smith, Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before?
2The phrase “Rilke’s wisdom is the secret of engagement” encapsulates the poet’s philosophy of fully & actively participating in all aspects of
life, including both “beauty & terror,” without becoming permanently attached or defined by any single feeling or outcome. This wisdom,
primarily found in his work ~ Letters to a Young Poet, encourages a deep & patient engagement with ones’ inner self & the world.
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