Grasping and Letting Go

Reading time: 7 minutes

Sensibly we all know that we cramp up if we hold on to material or spiritual matters for too long, and countless books and websites are full of tips on how to let go. This indicates an imbalance, because grasping requires letting go in the same way that we need wakefulness and sleep.

Buddhism teaches that our cramping up arises from desire: the desire to grasp everything that is beautiful, fine, tasty and good, and the desire to avoid everything that is ugly, painful, nasty and bad. Letting go of desire is a prerequisite to relax out of the cramp, yet if we want to let go of desire, we immediately create a new desire. It’s difficult to get out of that bind.

Especially evident, however, is our tendency to rigorously grasp the conviction that through logical thinking and hard work we can produce any desired situation or prevent any unwanted situations. Everyday life, on the other hand, shows us that the harder and more convulsively we grasp, the more undesirable are the situations we usually find ourselves in.

Of course we use thinking and doing in all our actions; we are obviously thinking and doing beings. It is only that in the West we have developed an enormous tendency to over-think and over-do. Once we start thinking and doing, we don't know how to stop. This creates an imbalance because every process needs both active and passive, yang and yin, movement and rest, day and night, sun and rain, in order to grow, develop, and mature.

A good example of balanced action is found in the Taoist concept of wei-wu-wei, which means something along the lines of ‘doing-by-not-doing’.[1] However, this doesn’t mean a mere passive attitude to life, but rather a deep wisdom that understands when our thinking and doing is called for and when it isn’t.

An athlete stands at the start of her Olympic competition. The road towards it gives a fine example of wei-wu-wei in practice. When this athlete started her respective sport, the technique had to be learned first. In that initial phase, a lot of conscious thinking and doing is needed to learn the technique, the rules of the game, to know the environment in which this sport takes place, how her body and mind react to that new environment, etc. As the training progresses, she has to think less and less when performing the sport, which makes it seem easier and easier; it becomes more and more an automatism. Once the rules of the game are known, she no longer has to think about them and the many hours of training offer enough time to get her body and mind accustomed to the new environment.

Then comes the next hurdle: she is going to perform the sport competitively. She then has to deal with the phenomena of winning and losing and perhaps also with jealousy when she proves to be a talent and quickly strives past opponents. She will therefore again have to do a lot of conscious thinking and doing to find balance in these new circumstances. The longer the sport is carried out in competition, the less conscious thinking and doing is required to maintain her balance in that particular environment.

What we see here is that learning a technique (in this case a sport, but this basically applies to everything we do) requires a lot of conscious thinking and doing from us in the beginning. The longer we practice the technique, the more our conscious thinking and doing fades into the background as it starts to become more and more second nature, until we get to the point where the whole process seems to go completely automatically (for our athlete preferably at the start of her Olympic competition).

Now we have developed a tendency to regard our automatic processes as ‘not ours’. For example, we say ‘I walk, I talk’ but we don't say ‘I beat my heart, I grow my hair’. Instead, we say, ‘my heart is beating, my hair is growing,’ as if we ourselves don't have all that much to do with it. Nevertheless, all these processes are controlled from our own brain. However, the difference between ‘I talk’ and ‘my heart beats’ is that the first is considered a conscious process, and the second an unconscious process. The first I do, the second happens to me.

As soon as our own process has become an automatism and we no longer have to think consciously when carrying it out, we tend to think that the process is no longer carried out by ourselves. This is exactly what is meant when athletes or performers say that they ‘lose themselves’ in a competition, musical performance or dance. The awareness of ‘I’ is completely absent at such a moment, in contrast to the first period of practice where there is a clear awareness of ‘I am doing it right or wrong.’

That awareness of right or wrong gives a lot of guidance in the beginning because we need to make ‘mistakes’ in order to be able to learn. However, as the technique and all peripheral matters are mastered more and more, hopefully that awareness will decrease simultaneously. Hopefully, because when our athlete is at the start of her Olympic competition wondering whether her preparation was right or wrong, she is not busy with her competition and it goes up in smoke. Exactly that right or wrong awareness must eventually be let go of, if we want to get into the flow where we ‘lose ourselves;’ and that is necessary to be able to perform achievements with which we even amaze ourselves. Because with the right/wrong awareness there is always fear which by definition causes inhibition; the last thing our athlete needs at the moment suprême.

Two stories about famous artists, David Bowie and Alfred Hitchcock, beautifully illustrate how they flawlessly and intuitively feel when the artistic process needs to be consciously grasped and when it needs to be let go. Reeves Gabrels, guitarist and co-writer of Bowie in the 1990s, said in an interview that Bowie treated expensive music studios the same as a four-track recorder on his kitchen table. For example, they sometimes sat for hours in the Mountain Studios in Switzerland just reading the newspaper, drinking coffee and chatting away.[2] To us that would seem like a waste of valuable studio time and money. But Bowie knew that the creative process could not be forced and especially not by looking at the clock. So they sat there quietly reading and chatting, until suddenly someone picked up a guitar and played a chord. Then something clicked in the other one, who said, “Hey, play that chord again! Now go to Gdim,” and then suddenly a melody arose. The studio time they were ‘letting go’, where in our eyes they were merely ‘doing nothing,’ turned out to be just as important for the songwriting process as the time that they actually spent writing and recording the songs. The ’letting go time‘ was needed to create room for the creative juices to flow uninterruptedly, just like the relaxation of muscles creates room for blood and nerve messages to flow uninterruptedly. Bowie knew like no other that the ’lost’ money would always return in one way or another.

One of Alfred Hitchcock's regular co-writers describes working with him on screenplays. When they reached a dead point in the process their discussions became heated and intense. At such moments, Hitchcock tended to suddenly stop the process and began to tell a story that had nothing to do with the work at hand. In our eyes, that would again be incomprehensible because how else are you going to meet the deadlines. Hitchcock, however, distrusted working under pressure, saying, “We’re pushing, we’re pushing, we’re working too hard. Relax, it will come.” Of course, he was always right and the inspiration came at the moment when the forced actions were let go of.

What both artists understand is that processes cannot be controlled by willpower alone (i.e. conscious thinking and doing), and great athletes, artists and, religious or political leaders for instance seem naturally capable of spontaneously grasping and letting go when the situation calls for it. Which, by the way, does not mean that they go through life carefree. Bowie once said in an interview that he thoroughly disliked the creative process. Every song, LP and artwork of his hand he called an inner urge that had to come out and did not leave him alone until it was born. He preferred to make love, because that gave him unconstrained pleasure.

A distinctive feature of the types described so far is: trust. Our athlete has complete confidence in her love for the sport to perform the best competition ever. Bowie and Hitchcock have complete faith in the muse, or that elusive concept called inspiration. Interestingly, they all have confidence in something outside of themselves. They do what they do not so much because they want to, but because they are called to it. Hence: calling (or: vocation).

When we recognize and accept our calling, another character trait is lost: anxiety. The calling, which seems to come from outside ourselves, indicates the direction and trust to walk that particular path. It is up to us, therefore, to listen carefully to what we are called to do!

Jolly greetings,
Erik Stout

[1] The principle wei-wu-wei can be interpreted in many ways. In this text I only share my interpretation which has proved very valuable to me.

[2] Until 1995, The Mountain Studios were owned by the rock band Queen. Since Bowie lived only twenty minutes from that studio, it's interesting to note how much he trusted the songwriting process over himself. Instead of writing, composing and arranging the songs before entering the recording studio, which we would call financially responsible or common sense, he set up all the instruments and equipment in the studio and started reading the newspaper. Inspiration always came.