Non-Attachment / When Love Means Letting Go ❤️

I have been thinking recently about one of the great paradoxes of being a parent.

I love this little person more than I ever thought it was possible to love another human being ❤️. Sometimes, most of the time, as I watch him play, the rest of the world simply disappears.

All I want to do is protect him, prepare him for life, keep him safe and somehow make sure he grows into a strong enough person to deal with whatever life eventually throws at him. Yet at the same time, I have to remember something that is really difficult for me and any parent to accept.

He doesn't actually belong to me. Well, he does. But he doesn't 😵‍💫 He does biologically, but he does not philosophically.

Kahlil Gibran wrote about this in The Prophet when he said that our children come through us, but they are not ours. They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself.

I have always loved that idea, although I think you understand it very differently once you actually have a child. Before Zaccy, it was all philosophy. Now it feels like something I am going to have to learn 😵‍💫❤️

Because what does it actually mean to say that your child doesn't belong to you?

I don't think it means becoming detached or pretending that this little person isn't the centres of our universe. Quite the opposite. It means learning how to love someone completely without confusing love with possession.

This is where I think Gibran's words meet something the old yogis spoke about constantly: love without ownership.

Zaccy is another traveller who, for a little while, has been placed in my care. My responsibility is enormous. I have to protect him when he needs protecting, teach him what I know, prepare him for the world and hopefully help him become strong enough to eventually walk his own path.

But the strange thing about parenting is that while I am supposedly raising him, he is very quietly raising me too. He exposes my patience, or occasionally the spectacular lack of it. He exposes my fears, my attachment and my desire to control things I probably cannot control. My trauma. And perhaps most importantly, he has given my life a sense of purpose that he was never actually responsible for giving me.

That's another strange paradox.

Our children shouldn't have to carry the burden of being the meaning of our lives. They have their own lives to live. Yet through loving them, caring for them and walking beside them for a few years, they inevitably change the meaning of ours. I think that is part of the spiritual side of parenting that doesn't get spoken about enough.

We assume the parent is the teacher and the child is the student.

But life has arranged something much smarter than that. Maybe we are both being educated. Well, its not a maybe. I am being educated by him.

I am teaching him how to cross a road, how to lose a football match without having a complete emotional breakdown ⚽️, how to treat people, how to become independent and eventually how to survive without me.

Meanwhile, without knowing it, he is teaching me about patience, fear, unconditional love, attachment and eventually the one lesson I suspect I am going to struggle with more than all the others combined → Letting go.

Because when they're little, love means holding on. You hold their hand crossing the road. You hold them when they're frightened. You hold them when they're hurt. You spend years trying to keep them close because that is exactly what they need from you. And then, almost imperceptibly, the job changes.

If you have done it properly, the little person you spent years protecting slowly becomes someone who doesn't need protecting in the same way anymore. The whole purpose of holding their hand was to eventually create someone strong enough to walk without it.

And that is the cruel and beautiful paradox of parenting. When they're little, love means holding on. As they grow, that very same love means learning to let go. And I already know that letting go is going to be one of the hardest things I will ever have to do.

But I'm hoping he will teach me that along the way too ❤️.

Perhaps you recognise some of this in yourself. The urge to protect them from every disappointment, every mistake and every painful experience, even though you know that some of those experiences are exactly what will shape them.

Maybe that is the impossible balance we are all trying to find as parents. When do we step in? When do we stand back? When are we protecting them, and when are we holding on because letting go frightens us?

None of us really knows. We are all learning on the job.

If you see me holding on too tightly or being overprotective, know that it comes from love, fear and the enormous responsibility I feel to get this right. And perhaps, if you look closely enough, you will recognise a little of yourself in that too.

Parenting may be the hardest job there is. Not because it is difficult to love them, but because it is so easy for love and fear to become tangled together.

Zaccy is still growing. And, because of him, so am I. Perhaps that is what our children are really here to teach all of us.

As for non-attachment, that isn’t something you simply do or practise. It is something you consider, and perhaps the understanding of it grows within you over time. You cannot process it intellectually or master it by reading about it. You can only live, love, lose, hold on and eventually let life help you make sense of it in its own time.

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Namaskar - Eternal Seeker

Zahir Akram

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