Feelings

Feelings are fleeting by nature, like the passage of clouds on a warm summer day.

Though too often we wear them like immutable masks and declare, “This is me. This is all I will ever be.” Sad. Resentful. Despondent. Happy. In truth they are masks, transient facades that hide a more true and vulnerable sense of self.

We put these masks on when we’re scared, when we’re too afraid to ask for attention and love; when we’re on the verge of breaking, but don’t know how to ask for help. When we’re in search of something solid in the face of groundlessness. Even happiness is something we try too hard to hold onto, strangling it of all significance in the process.

Feelings are signals: they point toward ourselves, toward the unknown. But they are not us.

To take this non-attached perspective is more terrifying than the feelings themselves; we would rather feel angry and sad than risk being a lonely drop in the ocean. “Yet what is an ocean but a multitude of drops?” Non-attachment is not detachment. Detaching is active avoidance whereas non-attachment is active engagement––detachment runs while non-attachment sits and feels and notices with non-judgment.

From the vantage of non-attachment, we can see our feelings as they truly are: simply feelings, waves that come and go like the seasons; things as permanent as the illusory grounds they stand upon.

Then who are we if not our feelings? What is under the mask? What is left?

We are something else entirely, something both more and less grounded, a shifting paradox, something wildly, unconditionally beautiful.

We are the calm after a storm.

A newborn’s first breath.

Tiny motes of existence.

A beam piercing through the darkness.

The light of Being.

Proof of grace.

Lucky.

Free.