To Disentangle

 

7 decades of living, has that make me wiser before the brain begins to degenerate? 

Don't know whether it is an age thing, but I have become a bit more sad when contemplating about the future of the world. Also I begin to believe more in destiny be it for individuals or the world at large. When Trump missed death by an inch in an assassination attempt pumping his fist up in defiance, I  thought to myself his stars are shining bright; but then again who knows what will happen next. I guess America has it owned destined path. 

Maybe it is the volatile nature of everything, the lack of certainty or permanence as well as the despair of wars and climate change that sends the mind twirling, not knowing what to expect next. 

The girl whom I have been counselling had begun to open up and confide in me when her mother stopped the sessions because she had to prepare for her PSLE. I have tried my best and there is nothing much I can do about it now. I know I must detach myself emotionally from my clients' problems. However the question keeps on arising in my mind why some people are born with more challenges than others. Just think of the sufferings endured by victims in the Gaza and Ukraine conflict. This question I have asked since my early teens; and as if in a cycle surfaces again frequently in recent times, unanswered

 In fact at this stage in life I need to detach not only from my emotions but from the concept of a self. 

Below is the transcript from a podcast by Ajahn Amaro:

"The more the heart is entangled with becoming, the more our life is an experience of continual pressure....it might be something that we are attracted to, something that we want, something that we are afraid of, something that we feel a duty to engage with, something that is irritating.....Any of these can be an object of becoming. Attraction, aversion, fear, duty, all of these make the heart very crowded.

Yet most of us are comprehensively addicted to the sense of being and identity that we get from all of that. The pleasant, the painful, the comic and the tragic, doesn't matter as long as it brings a sense of defined being, me being something. ....After the Buddha's enlightenment....he realises all the beings of the world, they are addicted to becoming. They love becoming. They relish becoming. But what they relish, what they love, brings pain.....caught in that love of defined existence" 

( Extracts from transcript Chapter 7.3- The fourth exit point from the Cycle (part 3- Ajahn Amaro podcast by Amaravati)

May I disentangle bit by bit.