Tag: letting go

Amnesty for Amnesia

We have all been deeply schooled in the value of “letting go.”  My Centering Prayer group talks often about “letting go and letting God.”  “Consider the lilies,” says Jesus in answer to two questions about anxiety: “… which of you by being anxious can add a cubit to his span of life? If then you are not able to do as small a thing as that, why are you anxious about the rest?”  OK, right. “Letting go” is also a pervasive theme in Buddhist meditative practice; I cannot tell you how many dharma talks I have heard on the necessity of letting be and letting go.  “If you let go a little you will have a little peace; if you let go a lot you will have a lot of peace; if you let go completely you will have complete peace,” says Ajahn Chah, and I believe him.  The problem is that I still have not been able to let go the of big things, while I am “letting go” of little things constantly.  And I don’t like it.

I let go of small things all the time – mostly names, but sometimes words.  I also let go of objects (reading glasses) or the reason why I walked into the kitchen. The most strange and aggravating thing about these little “forgettings,” these “senior moments,” is that I know the word or answer is buried somewhere in the folds of my grey matter, from whence it eventually surfaces – long after the moment when I need it.  Sometimes it teases me – I can remember that the name starts with an “S” (Sara?  Sally?) but still cannot produce the correct name when we meet up in the grocery store.  It is like when you wake up at the tail end of a dream – you try to grasp it but… it’s gone.  And then, while you are brushing your teeth and not standing in front of a woman trying to remember her name, the answer floats back into your consciousness.  “Stacy,” you say to yourself, “that woman’s name is Stacy.  Where was that name when I needed it?”  Where indeed?

These are small lapses, but it is not an inconsequential matter to me.  My mother spent her last years in a nasty sort of dementia, so every time my brain fumbles, I start to hyperventilate.

It bothered Elizabeth Bishop too, but she turned her lapses into the wonderful poem, “One Art“:

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

Losing things is an art; it’s going to happen, so we might as well get better at it, “accept the fluster.”  Bishop’s poem is bittersweet, pairing the need for acceptance with the letting go of keys, names, places, and the grief over things that are permanently gone.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Philip Larkin seems to take the letting go of memory as a blessing; the past is what gets in the way of future happiness.  Funny and cynical, in “The Winter Palace” he longs for the peace of an empty mind:

And [I] am starting to give offence by forgetting faces
And swearing I’ve never been in certain places.

It will be worth it, if in the end I manage
To blank out whatever it is that is doing the damage.

Then there will be nothing I know.
My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow.

Billy Collins at least has a sense of humor about it:

It is as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor

decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,

to a little fishing village where there are no phones. (from “Forgetfulness”)

Amnesia and amnesty both come from the Greek word amnestia – meaning oblivion, or forgetting.  Amnesia means “complete or partial memory loss” and amnesty means “a general pardon for offenses.”  Now, it is somewhat paradoxical that I have been working hard at “letting go” for years, and yet – when my brain is ready to part with something, albeit something as trivial as where I hid the extra key, I panic.  Silly.  And, I have been assured that these minor memory lapses are rarely a prelude to true dementia (from the Latin dementia, meaning “out of one’s mind”), which is defined as a condition characterized by progressive, persistent, severe impairment of intellectual capacity. Some self-amnesty for amnesia is in order. Clearly, I need to pair Bishop’s advice about learning the art of losing (“it isn’t hard to master”) with Larkin’s assurance that the less cluttered my mind is, the better.  And add a dash of Collins’ humor.  I just wish I could choose what my mind lets go of.  There’s some stuff I would really like to get rid of, but it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

I have written several other blogs on letting go and memory – if you are interested in the topic you might try “Whispered Words of Wisdom” or “Dementia, Creativity, and Forgetfulness.”

Whispered Words of Wisdom – Let It Be

I like autumn as a metaphor for old age. I know it is not a perfect metaphor; golden leaves on the trees renew themselves in the spring, but we cannot renew ourselves in the same way. Hopkins points out that the “Goldengrove unleaving” is a reminder of the “blight  man was born for.” And it is. And yet. I recent read a memoir by Pico Iyer entitled Autumn Light and would highly recommend it – or any of his books. There was this about fall in Japan:

And every year the autumn poses the same question, which I, every year, am barely able to answer. There’s no time to waste, the yuzu-colored light reminds me; and yet it would be a crime – a sin – to turn away from the beauty of the season. The bright days make me unable to resist the impulse to go outside; the days of sudden, unrelenting rain commit me to solitary confinement. I am not always ready to accept that it’s in surrendering my hopes and careful designs that real freedom comes. (my emphasis)

And it is really surrendering that I want to talk about – letting go. It should be so easy, and it is nevertheless the hardest thing. And not just for me. Every meditation or contemplative group that I have participated in comes back to this again and again. We know it will make our life easier; we know it is inevitable in the long run. But we cannot do it. And I would note here that letting go is not the same as disregarding; detachment is not apathy.

I have always known intellectually that letting go would help. When my son complained of stress at work, the only advice I would give him that I knew was right, was to not take it seriously, to let it go. To do the job well, but with detachment as to results and the regard of other people. This was advice I was never able to follow myself, but I knew it would have allowed me to work longer and healthier. And better. It’s even true of relationships – we all know of relationships that fell apart because one of the partners tried too hard, held on too tight, as William Blake knew:

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

Maybe it’s a little like dieting. It should be the easiest thing in the world not to eat. So it is with worrying, fretting, blaming, catastrophizing. Who wants to frighten ourselves to death? Apparently, most of us.

In old age many of the worries of our youth should have dissipated. Our children are grown, ambition has run its course, (most) passions are dulled. But that seems to make little difference. We worry about our grandchildren, our aches and pains, our declining loved ones. There is always something. But we also have our own very real experience proving that 99% of the things we worried about never came to pass – and even when catastrophe materialized, it was seldom as bad as we expected. Shouldn’t we have learned? The truth, I think, is that we have learned, but old habits die hard.

One thing we know will happen. We will die. Worrying about that not only won’t help, but it will diminish the days we have left. I started with the metaphor of autumn for old age. Autumn is a wonderful season, my favorite. But it would be spoiled if we just saw it as a harbinger of winter. Let it be say Lennon and McCartney. Fear no evil says the 23rd Psalm. You can only lose what you cling to says the Buddha. Consider the lilies says Jesus.

If you have figured out the trick to this – to letting go and letting be – let me know. Let all of us know.  Please.

My story, “Every Winged Bird,” does not give us an answer, but it does give a picture of someone who has given up everything which does not give her joy. It was part of a series I wrote inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Ovid knows about change, and in another poem he said “happy is the man who has broken the chains which hurt the mind, and has given up worrying once and for all.” He doesn’t tell us how, though.