This seems to be an often asked question. If you are no longer attached to things, be they events or material objects, in order for them to bring you happiness does this mean that you don’t care about them?
If you don’t need to achieve a certain goal in your life in order to be happy can you be passionate about that goal?
When we look at enlightened people they seem to be very chilled out. Can you only achieve this state if you don’t care and haven’t passion?
The short answer is no. You can care and you can have passion.
The struggle is in the way that we have been conditioned by our societies to attach happiness to things and that we should play the role of an unhappy person when those things are not in place.
Here is a great but simple example. Enlightened people are not afraid of death. Or to flip it another way they are not attached to staying alive to the point that if it was looking like death was close by they would be unhappy.
But an enlightened person will look both ways before crossing the road. “Aha!”, you might say. “If you look both ways before crossing the road then you are afraid of death. To be truly enlightened you would just step out”.
This is wrong but it is the way we have been bought up to think. Not being afraid of death does not mean not caring about staying alive. That took me a long time to get.
You can also be passionate about something and highly effective in it, in fact you can be more effective if you don’t attach happiness to certain outcomes.
Take someone who campaigns to end the abuse of children. If they thought “I won’t be happy until there are no abused children on this planet” they would condemn themselves to a lifetime of unhappiness.
No matter how passionately they campaigned it is highly unlikely they would achieve their goal in their lifetime. But it does not need to stop them being passionate and working hard.
To accept a situation as it is does not mean to do nothing. First accept the situation, then consider how to change it. You may not be able to completely change it, only make some small adjustments – just don’t fall into the trap of saying “I will only be happy if ….”.
When you do these emotions cloud your judgement and you actually become less effective.
Here’s an example I saw recently. Someone I know had arranged see a film with her friend and they had organised it so that her friend would drive them to the mall where the cinema was. I’ll just call her Sally to help the narrative.
Sally was very keen to see the film, she had heard a great many rave reviews and had spent the day really looking forward to it.
But her friend ran late because her son wanted a lift somewhere as well but wasn’t ready to leave on time. When her friend arrived to pick her up she was late and also announced that they would need to drop her son off somewhere before the cinema so would probably be later still.
This caused Sally to get really angry and a big argument erupted. Her friend had agreed to something and now it was probably not going to happen because she had also agreed to some other conflicting arrangement.
She had become so attached to seeing the film that she just simply could not accept the present moment. She was upset, her friend was upset. It was all a bit of a mess.
But films are films, they are not a once in a lifetime opportunity and once they have played once they will never be seen again. There was simply no need to be unhappy that she would not see that film on that day …. but she got very unhappy.
In the end they made it to the cinema, watched the film and both agreed it was one of the worst they had ever seen. Sally then became racked with guilt and having created such a great conflict over such a bad film.
And that’s where passion isn’t really passion, its an attachment that defines your state of happiness.
But wasn’t it better to have the conflict and then her friend would be more reliable in the future. That depends if you think it is your role to change other people’s behaviour?
If so there are many other ways to do it that don’t interfere with your happiness. The next time Sally could say, “I’m going to the cinema tonight but I’ll drive because I don’t want to be late, do you want to come?”
Even if it was a once in a lifetime event you can do all that you can to be there but stuff might happen because stuff does happen – perhaps the car breaks down and there is no time to fix it before the event and no other way to get to the event.
Well you worked with passion to try and get there but it is now clear that you won’t. If you tied no happiness to the event you could accept the present moment and be happy …