The Gift of Abandoning Hope

This is Gus. He was probably the greatest guinea pig I’ve ever known. And as you can see in this pic, he was pretty annoyed at the time. I think it was because he’d just realized that I had no more carrots to give him. That, and he tended to give me this look when he was ready to go back into his cage and I’d been selfish with my own desire to cuddle him. It’s easy to misread the moment and to force our own will on others.

For me, this has also translated into trying to force my own will onto destiny and the greater force that is life. Some call it spirit, some call it God, some call it the universe. Some might even call it the Force (Star Wars fans, you know who you are:). When I’ve sought to bend life to my will, well, it’s yielded results similar to Gus’s reaction. And yet because I am a stubborn soul who tends to use Sysphian methods, it’s taken me a while to learn to stop grasping and trying to control things. And how have I done this?, you might be wondering.

In her book, “When Things Fall Apart” Pema Chodron explores what happens when you embrace hardship as part of the human experience. She asks us to lean into suffering instead of avoiding it or trying to escape it. Her point is that when we aren’t trying to lessen the pain because we no longer fear it, we won’t rely on hope to reduce it. It then becomes easier to just be with things exactly as they are. She…