Letting Go for Better Vision

Life is forever changing, whether we like it or not. We must learn to accept the fact that we are sometimes powerless to stop any unwelcome change in our lives. But many of us would still strive to control our lives by avoiding and preventing those changes from happening. This is how we have created the stress in our daily living.

Stress affects our vision health because if our minds are stressed, our bodies become unrelaxed, and our eyes are parts of our body organs too.

Stress comes from our attachments to many things in this material world that confront us in our everyday life, and many of these are not only unavoidable but also insoluble. To overcome these daily challenges, many of us just turn to our attachment as a means of distracting ourselves from facing our problems head on. All of our struggles in life, from anxiety to frustrations, from anger to sadness, from grief to worry—they all stem from the same thing: our attachment to how we want things to be, rather than relaxing into accepting and embracing whatever that might happen after we have put forth our best effort.

Attachment is the source of human miseries. Worse, attachment may come in many different forms that we are unaware of.

Career attachments

Your career may span over decades, involving many ups and downs, such as promotion and unemployment, changes of career and pursuits of higher qualifications, among others. They may have become your problematic attachments.

Money and wealth attachments

Nowadays, to many people, enjoyment of life requires money—and lots of it—and you may be one of them. Attachment to money and the riches of the material world is often a result of an inflated ego-self. You may want to keep up with the Joneses—driving a more expensive car than your neighbors and friends.

Relationship attachments

Living has to do with people, involving agreements and disagreements, often resulting in mixed emotional feelings of joy and sorrow, contentment and regret, among others, and they become attachments to the ego-self as memories that you may refuse to let go of—forgetting and forgiving, for example, are hurdles often difficult to overcome.

Adversity and prosperity attachments

In the course of human life, loss and bereavement are as inevitable as death. Loss can be physical, material, and even spiritual, such as loss of hope and purpose. You may want to attach to the good old days, and refuse to let go of the current adversity. Adversity and prosperity attachments stem from the ego-self.

But human attachment is no more than a safety blanket to overcome fear—fear of change and of the unknown from that change. To cope with that fear, all attachments become distractions. According to Simone Weil, “Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.” Simone Weil

Read my book: The Wisdom of Letting Go. Find out how and why human attachments are obstacles to living a life of balance and happiness. Get the wisdom to let go of your emotional and material attachments in order to live as if everything is a miracle.

Stephen Lau 

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

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