But Will It Last?

The summer is coming to its end.

After months of punishing heat and humidity, I stepped outside the other morning and noticed the air was just a little cooler. The sun felt less aggressive. I could sit out in the morning light without immediately wondering why I made that decision.

This is my favorite time of year here. I want the windows open. I want to be outside. I want to take longer walks, linger over coffee on the porch, and generally enjoy the fact that Florida has finally stopped trying to cook me.

Of course, I know it won’t last long. 

That thought has had me thinking about impermanence lately, and about how so much of spiritual life seems to come back to the same basic question: how are we supposed to approach life given that everything in it is temporary?

People change. Bodies age. Relationships shift. Circumstances come together and fall apart. Seasons pass.

In one form or another, every great spiritual tradition has wrestled with that question. And if you have spent any time around yoga, you already know the familiar wisdom: do not cling to what is temporary. Practice nonattachment.

Understanding that advice is easy. Living it is something else.

Part of the difficulty is that nonattachment can itself become something we cling to. We decide that we should be more detached, more accepting, less disturbed by change. Then we start measuring ourselves against that ideal. Am I too attached? Why is this bothering me? Why can’t I just let it go?

Now we are chasing nonattachment in much the same way we chase anything else we imagine will finally make us content.

There is a paradox in that. Contentment tends to disappear the moment we make it an object of pursuit. Trying to force ourselves into peace gives the mind one more thing to be restless about. Equanimity, in yoga, is not really something we manufacture by trying to care less. It emerges as our relationship to self and experience changes.

The trick is to realize that nonattachment does not demand indifference.

We do not need to refuse to enjoy what is temporary, withhold affection because we might someday lose someone, or temper our happiness because circumstances might change. For one thing, we cannot simply decide not to care. Caring is part of our experience of the world, and there is nothing wrong with that. Trying to protect ourselves by caring less would only allow some future change to rob us of the present before that change has even happened.

Nonattachment does not require us to stop caring about the experience. It asks us not to let all the mental noise surrounding it take the place of the experience itself: Will this last? What will I do when it changes? What if I lose this?

The task is not to answer those questions. It is to return our attention to what is actually here.

How should we approach the impermanent? We should savor it while it lasts.

Savoring is possible precisely because we are not asking the experience to become permanent. We can enjoy the cool morning without needing Florida to remain this temperature forever. We can love a particular season of our lives without requiring life to stop changing around it.

That is very different from clinging. Clinging barely lets us enjoy the thing at all, because part of our attention is already occupied with keeping it. Savoring asks nothing of the moment except that we be present enough to experience it.

And this is where yoga becomes a practice rather than simply an idea.

On the mat, experience is constantly changing. A posture arrives and passes. A sensation appears, intensifies, softens, disappears. Sometimes we want to stay where we are. Sometimes we are waiting impatiently for the next cue.

The practice is not to become indifferent to any of it. It is to notice what is actually happening without becoming so tangled in our commentary about it that we miss the experience itself.

That is the kind of detachment that makes presence possible.

Not caring less, but carrying less into the moment.

Less anticipation. Less resistance. Less bargaining with change.

And perhaps, as a result, more appreciation.

The cooler mornings are here now. They will pass, as every season does.

For the moment, though, the windows are open.