Don't Cling, Be Detached

One of the traits of critical thinkers is their ability to be critiqued and also redefine the way they think. Critical thinking requires a lot of inward reflection. The ability to converse with yourself and constantly challenging your own ideas and thought patterns. It is the capacity to decipher someones harsh words, and the message that they are trying to relay when the topic is sensitive and difficult to listen to (i.e. an argument, debate, criticism, etc.)

I spend a lot of my time looking inward and I am very critical of myself. I am content with the journey that I am on and am sincerely grateful for the struggles I've experienced over the past 3 years. I've lost more in the last 3 years, than the prior 28 years combined. I can count two failed business ventures, every nickle I ever saved, a divorce, and my health. There are many tiny struggles within that massive sense of loss, but there's no need to elaborate; just know that these years tested my resilience.

I reflect back on all that I've lost, and all that I've gained and I regret nothing. I took risks, leaps of faith and failed each time. I put all my funds, and my heart on the line and lost it all. Not because of carelessness or naive behaviour, but because I felt compelled to take risks. With every great risk, there's a sense of hope and a sense of fear and each and every time, I chose hope. You know why, because failure needs to happen.

You need to accept loss as an inevitability in life.

Loss and failure are platforms for better days to come.

Risk taking is making the conscious decision to put something valuable on the line, knowing it can be lost. You are foolish to believe that the outcome will be in your favor, you need to plan as if things will be lost. Only at that point, will you see success in every failure, and only then will loss seem like the greatest gain you can ever make.

How so you ask?

Well, dear reader, I see it from this perspective - when I loose money, the university of life collects it's tuition. The sheer anxiety,anger, sense of loss and panic remap your mind, and give you a greater understanding than any lecture hall could ever give you. I always become a completely different person with loss. I become far more wiser, braver, and more confident with every decision I make whenever I loose something.

When you put your heart on the line and take that leap of faith with love, you are essentially putting your most valuable and personal asset up for grabs to someone who can potentially destroy it for you. You are willing to tell someone "here's my soul, treat it with care" and you do so willingly and naively, but somewhere inside you, the sense of fear lingers. Why wouldn't it? This is something that if treated poorly, can result in sleepless nights, anxiety, depression, mania, and so on. But that sense of hope which love inspires propels you forward because the reward is grand, if the outcome is that which you hoped for.

When the outcome you wished for comes crashing down and the sense of anxiety crushes you - you have two options. Allow it to suffocate you, or barely hold on for dear life. There is no immediate bounce back from such a loss. It treats a great amount of mental and spiritual conditioning to reclaim the rights to your soul. This process takes it and moves it to a higher understand, you see life with much more clarity and you feel a greater sense of wholeness.

You may disagree because many who lost health, wealth, and love sink into despair. However, it is you who allows despair to swallow you whole. It is also you who can scrape by from underneath the crushing pressure of anxiety and keep moving, even if you're just crawling.

This is why I titled this: Don't cling, be detached. Detachment is not that you do not own anything, but nothing worldly owns you (Imam Ali [a.s]). Loose everything worldly and gain so much more spiritual when you employ this way of life.

Every sense of difficult is a right of passage and a push in the direction of becoming a complete and 'whole' human being, who sees life for what it really is - a journey, a dream and race towards death.

Death, being the place where you reflect on that you've done and those whom you've left a legacy with; the one place where you won't count your dollars and won't remember the people who hurt you. It is the one place where you will count the blessings God endowed upon you to give to others.