Letting Go Is Not Giving Up

A class I'm in assigned an Alan Watts video. The title on it was "Act as if nothing matters." Watts never said those words, for the record. Somebody put that title on a compilation of his talks. The idea underneath it is his, though, and it is worth sitting with.

Then someone in the group pushed back, hard. If you don't care, then what matters? How does this not end with a guy on the street with a needle in his arm?

Fair question. It deserves a real answer, and recovery has one.

Stop clutching is not stop caring

When Watts says act as if nothing matters, I don't hear stop caring. I hear stop clutching. Those are two different things and for most of my life I could not tell them apart.

He had a name for the mechanism. In The Wisdom of Insecurity, back in 1951, he calls it the law of reversed effort, and then says he sometimes calls it the backwards law. Fight to stay on top of the water and you sink. Stop fighting and you float. He did not invent that. It runs through Taoism and Zen long before he got to it. What he did was put it in plain English for people like me.

He has another pair of words I keep coming back to. Serious and sincere. Serious is heavy. Serious is afraid of what happens if it goes wrong. Sincere gives everything it has and holds the outcome loosely. I spent years being serious and calling it commitment.

What I was actually holding

For me the grip showed up as control. I had to fix it. I had to get it right. I had to be the one people could count on. None of that is bad on its face. Underneath it was fear, and fear made everything heavy.

The one that is harder to admit is this. I was attached to relationships with women. I believed I needed one to be complete. That is what I would have told you. It was not true. What I was holding onto was the fear of being alone, and the fear of being left.

So I gripped. A grip like that does not build a relationship. It makes both people smaller.

When I finally let go of it, my life changed, and not in a small way. I found out I am all right on my own. I also found out I was never alone in the first place. I have family. I have friends. I have work that matters, including the veterans I sit with through Team SAPO. None of that arrived because I finally got a relationship right. It was there the whole time, behind the fear.

And here is the part I did not see coming. Once I stopped needing a relationship, I could actually be in one. I am in a healthy relationship now. It is healthy because I am not holding it like a life raft.

The tightest fist there is

Back to the question from the group. If nothing matters, why doesn't this end with a man on the street with a needle in his arm?

Because that man is not detached. He is the most attached man alive. He is gripping one feeling with everything he has, trying to control what goes on inside him. Addiction is not letting go. It is the tightest fist there is.

Apathy works the same way. "I don't care" is usually armor over "I cared too much and it hurt."

Recovery tells it from the other side

Nobody I know got sober by trying harder. That is my observation, not a study, and I have watched it play out enough times to trust it. They got sober when they quit running the show.

Step One is a letting go. So is the prayer you hear at the end of a lot of meetings, the one about accepting what you cannot change. Reinhold Niebuhr wrote that in 1932. AA picked it up in 1941, after a member found it in a newspaper obituary. It is not Big Book text. It is a prayer the rooms adopted because it works.

That letting go did not make anyone care less. It freed them to care about the right things.

About Watts

I'll be straight about him. He died at 58, of heart failure, after years of heavy drinking. He could describe the open hand better than almost anyone alive, and he could not live it.

I don't say that to knock him down, and it is not a reason to skip the work. I say it because it tells you what kind of thing this is. It is not a philosophy you think your way into. It is a practice. Most of us cannot do it alone. That is the whole reason we sit in rooms with other people.

What is left

So what matters, once I stop needing things to matter?

What is left is what I love. My family. The men I sit with. The work, done well, with the result held loosely. I still care how things turn out. I just don't need them to turn out a certain way to prove I am worth something.

That is the open hand. Not an empty hand. An open one. You can still hold things. You just are not squeezing.

If this landed, and you want to look honestly at what you are holding onto, book a discovery call. No pitch. Just a conversation.

Grow through what you go through.