1. Original Loss
Being human is yearning to recover the irretrievable. On Erich Fromm’s interpretation, humanity was born with The Fall. Adam and Eve became human once they had eaten from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil as they “emancipated themselves from their original animal harmony with nature." Humans may have transcended nature but they still belonged it. This lost harmony lives on in us an emptiness and a longing, a teasing possibility. But recovering our oneness with nature, Fromm thinks, is an impossibility because humanity:
…once torn away from nature…cannot return to it; once thrown out of oneness with nature…Man can only go forward by developing his reason, by finding a new harmony, a human on, instead of the prehuman harmony which is irretrievably lost.
In other words, the first command for humanity, the first requirement for becoming human, and the challenge life sets us when we are born, is to let go. And all of this is against our very first desire - to return.
2. Being Held
The most important things, the most real things…well up and take us over, hold us for a while, and then, finally, let us go.
Some things hold onto us. Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly call these “shining moments” where there’s a “whooshing up.” It’s the thing we experience when we celebrate moments in sports, when “everyone understands who they are and what they are to do immediately in relation to the sacred event that is occurring." Against the modern impulse towards control and our reverence of autonomy, these moments offer “what autonomy cannot: a sense that you are participating in something that transcends what you can contribute to it.” They take us with them and we give ourselves to them. In a way, being held by these moments is the purest form of letting go.
Letting go is part of an interaction. When we gaze into another's eyes, we are both holding a gaze and being held by one. We live between holding on and letting go, between control and surrender.
The journey from birth until death is a struggle between holding on (and being held) and letting go (and being released). Incapable of holding ourselves, we are born into the arms of another. We learn what love is in being held. This holding not only keeps us up but keeps us together. Being held means to be integrated. We see this when we get older as being in the world comes to mean constantly being asked to “hold it together,” so that we don’t fragment and fall apart.
Our mothers begin their lives with us in a relationship where they can’t let go. Then comes the moment when they must, even if they feel like they can’t. The sense that we’re being held or are not far from the arms that could hold us (or that these arms are waiting for us) allows us to wander. This is part of what Herman Hesse meant in his book Wandering when he wrote: “Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.”
We never really escape our need to be held. This need, at the bottom, is a need for wholeness. For the warmth and safety of the womb. One that even death does not annihilate.
3. Human Time
I had been mistaken in thinking that I could see clearly into my heart. But this knowledge, which the shrewdest perceptions of the mind would not have given me, had now been brought to me, hard, glittering, strange, like a crystallised salt, by the abrupt reaction of pain.
Marcel believed that he did not love Albertine. Then, when he was told, “Mademoiselle Albertine has gone,” the pain he felt revealed that this wasn’t true. He had loved her all this time and had convinced himself otherwise. His head had overcome his heart. Martha Nussbaum describes this revelatory moment in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time as cataleptic, a moment “of certainty and confidence from which nothing can dislodge us.” And this moment, in which Marcel’s heart speaks to him, reveals how he had been living in “human time,” time which is not measured by a clock but by the “the rhythms of pain and avoidance”:
Proust shows us how the temporality of the heart breaks with the rhythms of measuring devices. The full story of love - its intermittences, its rhythms of pain and avoidance - can be comprehended only by a reflection that observes the specifically human temporality of desire and habit, which proceeds its own laws of felt duration.
David Whyte writes that learning to forgive is essential because:
At the end of life, the wish to be forgiven is ultimately the chief desire of almost every human being. In refusing to wait; in extending forgiveness to others now, we begin the long journey of becoming the person who will be large enough and generous enough to receive, at the very end, that absolution ourselves.
Human time is waiting a lifetime to let go. And then, in that final moment, still having the power to absolve a lifetime, forever. Love and death are our first encounters with eternity. And all it takes is a look to fall in love. And all it takes is a breath to die.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Letting go takes a lifetime to master because events reveal themselves over time. There are many reasons for this. First, experiences are always so much more than we can know (that’s why we must rely on our intuition and also why it’s an unavoidable tragedy that things only become clear to us after so much pain and beyond the point of repair). Second, some experiences are so large and overwhelming that they hide from us until we are ready to face them or are forced to by circumstance. Third, the past takes on new meanings as life goes on. When the reality of an absence is renewed at a milestone or when greater consciousness reveals something we’d missed and all the love and horror that this implies.
There are two insights that point to our unreadiness and to the secrets that experiences keep from us as we grow into ourselves. The first comes from Rilke’s advice to the Young Poet:
Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be give you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
The second is from David Whyte’s revelations about nostalgia:
Nostalgia tells us we are in the presence of imminent revelation, about to break through the present structures held together by the way we have remember: something we thought we understood but that we are now about to fully understand, something already lived but not fully lived, issuing not from our future but from something already experienced; something that was important but something to which we did not grant importance enough, something now wanting to be lived again, at the depth to which it first invite us but which we originally refused.
Clock time is past-present-future. Human time is promise-longing-dreaming. In clock time, every moment is equal. In human time, moments can sing the song of a lifetime. Letting go belongs to human time because it is an oscillating movement that disrupts the clock’s forward march. It involves retrieval and return, transition and transformation, dissolution and emergence, discovering and releasing, plummeting and settling. All of this is implied by the simple and linear instruction, “move on.”
4. Fear of Life
We have become afraid of our inner feelings because they hold such a massive amount of negativity that we fear we would be overwhelmed by it if we were to take a deeper look. We have a fear of these feelings because we have no conscious mechanism by which to handle the feelings if we let them come up within ourselves. Because we are afraid to face them, they continue to accumulate and, finally, we secretly begin looking forward to death to bring all of the pain to an end.
James Baldwin believed that “one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, “once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” Fear of pain is ultimately a fear of life as “fear of life is really the fear of emotions.” This fear of overwhelm is a fear of collapsing under the heaviness and seriousness of reality. On David Hawkin’s understanding of emotions, thoughts are produced by the accumulation of pressure behind feelings. This means that we cannot think our way out of pain. When we repress our emotions, pressure begins to accumulate and eventually forces their relief through expression. We are forced to confront them on their terms, in self-undermining thoughts and destruction. On this view, letting go, despite everything, is a simple and unremarkable, yet utterly difficult act:
Letting go involves being aware of a feeling, letting it come up, stay with it, and letting it run its course without wanting to make it different or do anything about it. It means simply to let the feeling be there and to focus on letting out the energy behind it.