Retracing steps

Circa 2000. Was watching Oprah as she introduced "Tuesdays with Morrie" on her regular book club show. Usual books introduced were soppy, sometimes biographies are just plain hard to read and always meant to be angsty. I caught sight of a thin book which she adamantly proclaimed was a 'life-altering' book in her big voice and big hair. And she was right.

Many a times I have bought this book for friends' birthdays, quoted it in letters and picked a lesson out from it. These few days have been no exception.

Detachment doesn't mean you don't let the experience penetrate you fully. That's how you are able to leave it.

Take any emotion: love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I'm going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on the emotions - if you don't allow yourself to go all the way through them - you can never get detached, you're too busy being afraid. You're afraid of the pain, you're afraid of the grief, you're afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails.

But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, "All right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment".

***

Circa 2006. Been bouncing like a metronome, I'm so tired of the assumptions and trying and believing. Wanting to hold back, detach; yet still trying to feel 19 years old again.

The age when I promised myself that I will truly live and feel. Cry, laugh, dance, get angry and learn to say 'no'. Since then I have learnt to do all those but reality also dropped in and became the irritating neighbour that would not move away. After three years of him, memories were deliberately forgotten; cruelly and ruthlessly dumping naivete.

Trying to detach after the drama this weekend. While I'm at it, will someone please lead me back to where the streets of "free spirit" and "childlike-ness" converge so that I won't fully detach as well?