"Don't cling to things because everything is impermanent." ~ Mitch Albom
As humans, one thing we always strive for is perfection. We spend our days trying to attain a goal or reach a target. But then the question of "what is perfection?" comes to play. What seems like perfection to one person can be inferior to another person, it all depends on how we view things. It depends on our mindset.
When dealing with the mind, there are categorically five passions of the mind; lust, anger, greed, attachment and vanity. Until a person overcomes all these passions of the mind, they would continue in an unending cycle–searching for perfection.
So many people are ignorant of the fact that their minds are controlled by the above mentioned passions while some others know about it but they choose to toss this fact aside. I have had my fair share of these passions. In one way or the other, I have demonstrated them but for today, I would be elaborating on "attachment".
You may agree with me that being too attached to anything or anyone can be very bad. The worst type of attachment is the attachment to material things. It could be that you're attached to your mobile device, your earpods, your car or even your favourite jewellery. If something mistakenly happens to the "thing" you are attached to, you feel like your walls are crashing but in actual sense, they are not.
Sometime ago, an incident happened and it taught me detachment. I lived in a lodge with some other students and our lodge rarely had a power supply. We usually had to find our own means to power our devices and most times, we paid to power these devices.
Image is Mine
On one of those days, I woke up really early, around 4:30 am. It was our examination period so I planned to start reading after washing up in the bathroom. As you would imagine, there was no light so I had to turn on the flashlight on my phone. In the bathroom, there was usually a bucket filled with water by the corner. Immediately I stepped foot in the bathroom, I do not know how it happened but in a split second, I saw my phone inside this bucket of water. I didn't trip on anything and no, I do not sleep-walk either.
I immediately grabbed the phone from the bucket of water and opened the back part. The only good thing was that the phone was an old model so the back cover could be easily opened.
I dried the phone, put it in a bag of rice and tried all the things I knew but to no avail. That was how I lost my phone. It felt like I couldn't breathe anymore. You know that moment when you're so pained and you cannot even cry? That was the moment for me.
My whole day turned out very bad as all I could think about was the fact that I had become phoneless. The painful part was that the majority of my school notes and audio recordings were on that phone.
If someone had told me that I would be staying for weeks without my phone, I wouldn't have believed it because I was too attached to the phone. I barely used to give the phone breathing space:)
The first day passed and I was still mourning my loss. Two days, three days and then a week. By the end of that week, I realised that I couldn't keep grieving about a phone so I had to move on. That was one of the most painful weeks in my life but I learnt a very vital lesson–detachment.
At first, it may seem totally impossible to live without certain things but when it eventually happens, we come to the realisation that we can in fact live without these things. Irrespective of how we want to view it, we have all been attached to something or someone at a point in our life. I'm not saying that attachment is bad, all I'm saying is that we should learn to create a balance in our lives. By balance I mean, as we are being attached we should also learn detachment. This way, life would be made easier and worthwhile. With this, a degree of perfection would be attained.
With love, wongi✨