i promise i won't let go.

Our final late night (or early morning, I guess, since it ended at almost 2 a.m.) lecture was heavily devoted to the concept of detachment.

I am a person who revels in long, tedious philosophic discourse. I really do.
Thankfully, I have one friend equally game for these kinds of heady conversations. These people are hard to find...normal people don't mind ten of fifteen minutes of chatter about the meaning of life and the softer points of ethics/morality/purpose/intention/God/etc...but I'm not talking fifteen minutes...I'm refering to five hour discussions, wherein you might not come up with so much as one single satisfying answer, about incredibly subtle stuff. It isn't exactly what you'd call a good time. It is almost requrisite that Lynn (my friend) and I go to a resturant that stays open until the wee hours of the morning and serves decent red wine to even embark on one of these nights. Trust me when I tell you--once you get midway through one of these verbal endeavors--you can not stop until you've finished. No matter how huge your headache has grown, no matter how many circles you seem to turn in, not matter how much you want to bang your skull against the wall--you can not stop until it is finsihed.
The discussion of anything philisophical is like swimming across a river.
The exhaustion and frustration hits at exactly mid point...and it will take just as much energy to turn around and swim back to the bank you started on as it takes to just bear down and finish the cross.

So, while I really wanted to be released by Bikram at an earlier hour...I also, begrudgingly, understand why we weren't.
We were in the middle of the river.

My single most loathed esoteric topic is detachment. So, naturally, we had to linger endlessly on that particular concept.

The mere word "detachment" makes me profoundly sad. I don't even know why exactly.
My basic attitude towards it has always been, "nope. don't wanna and you can't make me."

Paritally, I guess, its because I am, by nature, a highly emotional and involved person.
If a cabbie tells me his daughter is starting college during a ten minute ride from the east side of Manhattan to the west side of Manhattan, I will spend the rest of the day worrying about how he, a taxi driver, will afford the astromical expense of higher education in this country. When one of my parents casually starts a line of thought with, "well, if one of us dies before.....", I want to crawl into the fetal postition and rock myself to sleep. If I love someone, they pretty much have to literally, or metaphorically, kick me in the stomach to make me finally go away... I do not like detachment. I do not like letting people, or my ideas about how things should be, go. And, of course, that tendency leaves me ripe for all kinds of disappointment and frustration. I know this.

Now, with that said, were I to witness this crazy "detachment" thing successfully performed around me, I might be more open to it. But I never do. Lynn seems to get it pretty well...but the girl meditates daily, spends all of August, every year, at teachings with her Buddhist guru, and hangs out in India at ashrams for months at a time. I'm not even sure she's so much detached as she is just out of the city. She might well be in India stewing over someone or something that happened years ago, totally not letting it go, being a huge unevolved baby, and I just don't know about it because I can't see her.

I knew this guy, in my mid twenties, while I was living in Rome. We only overlapped there one month, but became immediate friends. When you live, day to day, in a place where you are incapable of sustaining really substantial conversations in the local language, the oppourtunity to speak in your mother tongue is like hitting nirvana. We skipped the chit chat and headed straight into desperately important, maniac talking. All day. About everything.
I adored this kid.
He was hilarious, thoughtful, introspective, sensitive, self effacing, and imaginative.
He might have been the first person to ever really introduce the concept of being detached, an obsession of his, into my consciousness. Even at a first and basic introduction, I knew I wouldn't like it one bit.

Now, under those circumstances and at that age, one subject of inquiry tends to consume the majority of one's energy ...especially on Italian summer nights. That subject?

love.

Sparing absolutely no details, we delved into our romantic resumes, psyches, and seventh grade journals trying to figure out who we were and what 'it' was.
I told him all of my stories, he told me all of his.
And in every vignette of his romantic history, there were two girls.
One, the girl he was in love with. The other, the girl he chose. Every time. He was only comfortable being with the person he knew he wasn't overly attached to. It was a blatantly obvious theme. It was as if every one he chose...he chose instead...of the one he wanted more. So, okay.

The upside to his approach was that, in the ensuing break ups, he was never really bloodied up or injured. He prided himself on his ability to detach from the relationship, and person, so well. But the problem with such trippy thinking was that its not really a succesful bout of "letting something go" if you didn't really hold it closely to begin with....not so difficult to give up something you never really wanted.
He was just standing in dead space. Never going inside, never leaving. Holding nothing, releasing nothing.

What he called 'detached' struck me as just a fancy synonym for frozen. Also sterile. And lonely, I think.
Which was so criminal, because he was definitely one of those people for whom epic love would not be a stretch. An exquisite guy, that one.

So, I am sitting here now writing this boring blog entry. I know it isn't funny. I've done way better. My apologies. I'm tired and now I've got this damn lecture in my head all week. Nothing buzz kills my good time like the word "detachment."
Its like the lochness monster, detachment...everyone claims its real but who ever really gets to see it?

Actually, I take that back. I might have witnessed it once. Sort of.

My grandfather had a gigantic cancerous tumor in his leg when i was a small child.
It was vast and the chances that he was going to get through the operation without amputation were marginal, at best.
Before they put him under, he met with the surgeon and said only this:

"If there is any way for me to keep my leg, i really really want to."

I would venture a guess that that simple request was the single most genuine thing he ever asked for in his life.
A man wants his left leg. He just does.
Hard to be more attached to something than that....

When I think of detachment, well executed, I think of him. He didn't check out emotionally. He wasn't unwilling to long for the best possible outcome. He was keenly open to all of the fragile and potentially devastating effects that are inherent in investing in anything, hoping/wanting/needing/loving anything. He didn't "detach" by standing far back from the precipice of feeling...he walked right up to the edge of it and stared it down. He allowed the experience, outcome unknown.

The next day he woke up without a leg. And in the two and half decades I knew him, I never once heard him whine about the leg that was no longer. In fact, I don't recall him so much as mentioning it. He wanted what he wanted, and he got what he got. Both of those things beautiful, Both of them necessary and true.

So as not to leave on a serious note:
A few days ago on the elevator, about 20 yoga campers were piled in, talking loudly, and dripping with sweat, heading up to our rooms after class. An Ilikai staff member got stuck in with us. She was friendly and good natured about it. One yogi said, 'sorry. I know we must be hard to get used to." She said, "no...no...don't worry. I understand. I used to teach special ed...."

not making ths stuff up.