You Can’t Hold on to Anything

Coveting Kills

I was reminded by a post from one of my Facebook friends that we lose many things in our lives by trying too hard to hold on to them. Many years ago I  had a girlfriend who had been a high-fashion model, working runways and some of the glitzier magazines of the day, including Cosmopolitan, Town & Country, etc. I met her through our mutual activity in the anti-war movement, including our work with the Vietnam Veterans Against The War. She had gone to Vietnam several times as a USO entertainer.

She was, as she put it, getting a little “long in the tooth’ and her modeling days were pretty much over (she was seven years older than me and I was approaching 30). She was constantly worrying about how old she looked, spending what I thought was an inordinate amount of time on her makeup and hair, especially if we were going out. One day it dawned on me just how much the constant worry was causing her to accelerate the aging process. Through the act of worrying she was actually making herself look older. I told her that and, frankly, I don’t think it made much of a difference to her. She was caught up in a “death spiral” of concern for losing something it’s impossible to hang on to.

It – as so many things do – also reminds me of the lessons I learned from reading Alan Watts‘ Book “The Wisdom of Insecurity“, the most important of which is that there is no such thing as security and absolutely anything can be snatched from you at any time; including your health, life, etc. Alan points out the futility and self-destructiveness of trying to hang on to things and the paradoxical value of “letting go”. He bases his teachings on those of Zen Buddhism. Currently, I’ve read the book three times over the years . . . and each time it has either drastically changed how I saw things or comforted me in my acceptance of things I couldn’t change. I recommend it highly.