Hoarding and grasping
I regularly check my emails for notice of the latest missive from my favourite writers and sources of information, inspiration, and ideas. One of my favourites is Nick Cave’s weekly “The Red Hand Files”, an unfailing source of compassion, thoughtfulness, and spiritual inspiration.
I have written and spoken about Nick Cave in my introductory talk to the series “Building A Treasure House In The Mind” where I relate his experience of suffering to the experience of another of my favourite writers, the religious historian Elaine Pagels.
But today I want to pick up on something written by another of my favourite writers, Oliver Burkeman. His twice monthly letter “The Imperfectionist” is another invaluable source of thoughts and ideas.
With the heading “You can’t hoard life”, early in December 2023 he wrote this:
“One day last week, following a night of heavy snowfall here in the North York Moors, I took a morning walk along the ridge behind our house. The snow was still falling gently, catching the pink light of the sunrise. I watched a flock of birds alight on a distant tree. Aside from the movement of the birds, the landscape felt utterly asleep. It was a magical experience.
And so, naturally, I found a way to feel bad about it.”
He describes Buddhist psychology as ‘uniquely insightful’ in explaining how we can make ourselves miserable … “not just by railing against bad experiences, or craving experiences we aren’t having, but by trying too hard to hold onto the good experiences we are currently having.”
William Blake understood this well when he wrote:
“He who binds to himself a Joy,
Doth the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the Joy as it flies,
Lives in Eternity’s sunrise.”
And to complement the English poet William Blake, the great Scottish poet Robert Burns captures something of the elusive beauty of change that can’t be grasped or controlled:
“But pleasures are like poppies spread,
You seize the flow’r, its bloom is shed;
Or like the snow falls in the river,
A moment white—then melts forever;
Or like the borealis race,
That flit ere you can point their place;
Or like the rainbow’s lovely form
Evanishing amid the storm.”(Extract From Tam O’Shanter)
As Oliver Burkeman says, it’s sad that a beautiful moment passes and vanishes forever, but as he puts it, “it’s the kind of sadness that might otherwise be described as “poignancy”: a feeling that deepens the experience you’re having, rather than detracting from it. The kind of feeling you get once you’re no longer grasping and clutching at the moment – thereby, ironically, driving it further away from you – but stepping fully into it, experiencing yourself as a part of it, being it.”
I’m reminded of the Buddha’s teachings on the three marks of conditioned existence and their associated gateways to liberation, in particular the characteristic of impermanence and its gateway of the signless.
In my talk on the “Signless” in the series “Gateways to Liberation” I said:
“The process of labelling, of capturing something, or trying to fix something, with a word or collection of words, becomes a grasping, a desire in some way to control what is happening. Instead of allowing ourself to be part of something much more, we instead strengthen the hold of the ego.”
The Buddha’s teachings on the three characteristics of impermanence, suffering, and insubstantiality, and the linked gateways to liberation of the signless, the wishless, and emptiness, are, for me, core foundations of my Buddhist practice in everyday life.
But the ability of writers like Oliver Burkeman to succinctly capture something of the essence of those teachings in a form accessible to a much wider readership than just Buddhists, sometimes takes my breath away.