Have you ever gotten to the point of utter despair with a problem, or a project, or life, and said “I give up” – and it felt good? Have you ever been liberated by failure, by what seemed like the worst that could happen?


This is not far from the point of meditative practice. When we sit to meditate, we’re giving up. We’re releasing our ambitions, hopes, fears, wants, issues, loves, hates. As they come up in our heads, we’re letting them float away rather than trying to hold on and win. We’re saying “I give up” to all the phenomena of the everyday world that seem important but are all in a state of going away no matter what we do.


Instead we’re connecting through unfiltered experience with the actual thing that doesn’t go away: existence itself. Or awareness, or mind, or energy, or the absolute, or God, or something that doesn’t have or need a label at all. We’re letting go into unity with what no one owns but what belongs to everyone and what everyone belongs to.


Do we need a point of despair before we give up? Well, it helps. For letting go there’s nothing like realizing everything is lost.


But instead of waiting for life to present us with the despair of unwanted circumstances, we can relax courageously into the human predicament of mortality, into the impermanence of everyone and everything in the universe including our current lives.


Every appliance in our kitchen is going to fail. Every job we get will go away or to someone else. Every home is a rental even if the deed says we’re the owner. Every relationship we have is going to end, if by no other means than the end of life.

Buddhism gets a reputation as a pessimistic religion for this sort of contemplation. But at the other side of those hard truths lies the only true and lasting joy we can experience. Christians might call it resurrection.


Only when we stop worrying about the future of something can we feel the complete joy of its present. The worrying itself is most of our human suffering, and it stomps on happiness when it comes. We can plan the future, but with presence, steering between the pitfalls of certainty and fear.


The impermanence of everything is in fact its joy. If we could really possess something permanently, it would lose its luster. The uncertainty of later is the magic of now.


What if we could focus on loving and appreciating our partners every moment we are with them, giving up possession and jealousy and fear of loss? Wouldn’t we be more likely to keep those partners? And if that isn’t enough to keep them, isn’t it right and natural to move on?


We should love all of life that way. By sitting with brave, appreciative stillness in the midst of it, and letting go into liberation from every moment except the one we’re in.