August 27
“Let go of what lies behind you. Let go of what lies before you. Let go of what is in between. Whoever crosses over with a free heart is no longer seized by becoming and passing away.”
Dhammapada, 348 (freely rendered)
Listening mode
“Let go of what lies behind you. Let go of what lies before you. Let go of what is in between. Whoever crosses over with a free heart is no longer seized by becoming and passing away.”
Renunciation and letting go look alike from the outside. In both cases you relinquish something: a hope, a grudge, a plan you have held on to for a long time. Where they differ often shows only later.
What you have renounced stays with you, only with the sign reversed. You know exactly what you are no longer reaching for, and sometimes you tally up what it has cost you. Renunciation keeps accounts. Quietly it makes you into someone who has given something up.
Letting go has no such bookkeeping. Afterwards there is no one left to credit themselves with the sacrifice. That is exactly where the difficulty lies: you cannot strive for it without immediately turning it into renunciation. As soon as you make an effort to be serene, you watch yourself doing it and count your progress.
Perhaps you only notice it in hindsight. Something that occupied you for a long time comes back to mind one day, and you realise you haven't thought about it for quite a while. You can't find a day on which you decided that.
