One of my favorite subjects

From Clear Mind Zen:

"Non-attachment means non-investment. We suffer in direct proportion to our emotional investment in something we perceive we are about to lose."

more here

I seem to have turned a couple of corners on this recently. I think I've mentioned before that there were attachments which I was able to give up easily - fashion, for example.

There were other attachments, though, which were harder to give up - even though it was plainly obvious they were causing me pain all out of proportion to the occasional good feeling I got from them. We have a line of thought in our culture that one should never give up. But this is an invitation, if misinterpreted, to keep banging our heads against the wall in search of things we're never going to get. We expend energy in pursuit of those things that could be more effectively applied to other purposes – or in my case, not applied at all.

Alternately, we may expend so much energy and effort on getting our desires that once we've achieved them, there's no way they're going to be worth what we sacrificed for them.

(I wonder, for example, if Mitt Romney had eventually been elected president, whether he would have found the experience worth the $40 million or so of his own money he spent campaigning for it.

That's an extreme example, of course. What about the couple who buy a house that's right on the outer limit of their ability to afford it, and then they both lay awake every night worrying about it?

What about the person who finds a sexy, glamorous partner and then discovers he or she spends more time ad energy coping with the partner's craziness than enjoying the partner's company?)

I still have a few lingering attachments that are of the 'don't have but think I'd like to have' variety. In some ways, these are easier to live with because of their impossibility. There's no tangible object dragging me down. It's not so much the attachment that's the problem as it's the 'never give up hope' thing churning in the back of my mind.

But as time goes by, and I get older, wiser (I hope) and frankly slower, some of these attachments seem to just disappear by themselves. I don't have any great epiphany about them; I just realize one day that they don't mean anything to me anymore.

And sometimes I miss the little adrenalin rush and anxiety that comes with wanting things, but I don't miss it much.