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Letting Go

I write this while on the tail end of a stinking cold, so apologies if at any point it vanishes off into delirious paracetamol land….

I am broadly and thinly educated.  I know, for example, exactly enough about computers to be able to diagnose for my partner exactly what the nature of the problem is as he attempts to convert a .cvs file into a spreadsheet, but can I solve it?  HELL NO.  I can read 3% of the Chinese texts at the British Museum.  I can tell you that the Korean alphabet was custom-created for its purpose, that Amharic is a language spoken in Ethiopia and that while NASA spent the 1960s trying to invent a pen that worked in space, the Russians used pencils.

Ask me to delve deeper into anything apart from history, theatre and writing, and I got nothing, but that’s not really the point.  I love knowledge.  I love the vastness of it all; I love that there’s always more stuff to learn, more stories to hear.  I love that behind every bit of new information that lands in my lap, there’s something human.  People who did things; cultures that made choices; lives that changed and lives that grew.  I find knowledge an incredible pathway to meeting humanity in all its forms, and it is wonderful.

I want to acquire more knowledge.

I want to travel, and see things, and do things, and meet people, and become fluent in Chinese and learn new martial arts and how to work clay and build houses and – with ever-increasing urgency – how to combat climate change, ‘cos I really do think we might be kinda fucked.

And yet I don’t.  I kinda sit around on my arse at home.  To be more exact, I sit on my arse at home working, and then I climb ladders, and then I sit at LX desks, and then I go back to sitting on my arse and work more.

Listening to – you guessed it – a podcast recently (I believe while working out trim height for some borders for a musical…) there was a Buddhist monk who gave a little speech about ‘letting go’.  It’s the easiest thing in the world to be a monk, he exclaimed.  You don’t have property, you don’t have to commute to work, you don’t have to work in the conventional sense, you just have to let go of all the things which tie you to suffering.  Friends, family, money, job, house, possessions etc..

On hearing this, a part of my soul jumped up and started waving its hands around with a cry of yes, yes yes yes yes that’s me!  Ohohoh pick me!  I am bound by all these things; the anxieties that I attach to all this bind up my life YES!

Then a sterner part of my soul kicked in, and reminded me that actually, I kinda love my life, and am in no hurry to walk away from it altogether.  Perhaps, then, a partial wandering?

I’m not loaded, though by dint of living in London I’m automatically on an economic ladder that throws me towards the top 1% of the population of the globe.  However, I have enough cash in the short-term that I could just drop it, go to China and learn the language; abandon ship for six months and learn beginner’s archery, how to cook Thai food or lobby for a cause.  It’s a hugely privileged position to be in, and I know it.  I don’t go however, because to do so would involve letting go of certain convictions that shape not just my, but a large part of society’s attitude to life.  A conviction that if I’m not working, I’m somehow lessened.  That if I’m not working, I am taking a risk with my life.  A conviction that if I’m not earning, I will be screwed.  (And sure, I can’t not-work for long.)  A fear of the future, a fear of the presence, a sense of duty to the life I’ve built here, all this holds me back so yeah, maybe the monk was right.

Maybe all these things I cling to cause suffering.

But here’s the swing of that argument.  1.  If I didn’t work I’d go nuts.  I love writing books, I love doing shows, and yes, there’s other things I want to do too, but to walk away from these things I love altogether would, I think, lessen everything, including myself.  2.  There’s a difference between the letting go of things which bind you to an unhealthy way of life (twitter, money, poisonous relationships etc.) and which in doing so, define you in a way that induces suffering, and letting go of perceptions of these things.

Or to put it another way… a few months ago I wrote a blog about mindfulness, and talked about shaving my head.  Now I could cut my hair off in an instant, and it’d be very odd and make me feel a bit peculiar for a while, but that’d be fine.  It’d be fine because I get that it’s just hair, and yes, my outward physical appearance changes how others feel about me, but it doesn’t change me.  I do not invest my physicality with too much meaning (I mean, I probably do – bodies are complicated things – but I fight it); nor do I invest my possessions with meaning other than fondness for a gift kindly given or satisfaction in a useful tool or joy in a thing which contains learning.  I do not crave diamonds for the sake of having something sparkly; I do not keep my old teddy bear because I am fearful in the dark, but rather I keep it (him, to be exact – his name is Lepe) because I remember my childhood and all that it was and all that I was and in remembering, remember how I am different now.  These things can be crutches, or they can be reminders of something good; I hope I tend towards the latter.

And then there’s learning.

You can ask me to let go of a lot of things.  I can, very, very slowly, begin to see that my anxiety about waking up when I’m 65 unable to pay for my bills is, perhaps, at the age of 29, a bit too pronounced.  Rational, maybe, but unhealthy too.  I can re-define what I need in my life to be happy, I can ask questions as to what I value and what is just insubstantial guff that will pass with time.  But knowledge, for me, is a gateway to humanity, and to walk away from that is to deny something fundamentally, awesomely human.

There are also human problems out there that I don’t think should be let go of.  Climate change is a biggy, but also education and the promotion of basic human understanding rank pretty high up that list.  So if you catch me letting go of anything any time soon, it’s quite possible I’ll be doing it only so I can grasp something more important, that little bit harder.