Skip to main content

Holding sand


Frozen sand on the lake in Muurola
My favorite passage in the Bhagwad Gita Chapter 2, verses 62-63. In these verses, the Lord Krishna explains how attachment causes desire, which leads to anger, then confusion, then weakness of memory and intellect and eventual ruin. I try to remind myself of this passage as often as I can, but, as human nature would have it, I often forget and cave to attachments anyway.
Fortunately, fate, the Universe, God—take your pick—has a way of intervening when this happens. Take my most recent reminder that came through a friend. Despite the frustration I was causing him, he patiently explained the reality - a reality I was so adamantly denying because it did not fit into the outcome I wanted. His words stopped the attachment that I had begun to form to an unlikely outcome.
Ever since coming to Finland, I have been trying to take things as they come. I try to not think about whether things will work out or not and focus on just completing the tasks ahead of me. This detachment may be because of the circumstances that brought me here, which were random and unexpected. I applied for the Fulbright grant without particularly thinking about whether I received the grant or not. I wanted a goal to work towards and applying for a Fulbright seemed like a good goal to have. The thought of coming to Finland didn’t occur to me until after I had been accepted.
It has been in those instances when I became too attached to the outcome that things have started to unravel. The situation with this friend was one but there have been several. I expected a conference to go a certain way but was left disappointed when it did not match my expectations. Class assignments or presentations that I was trying so desperately to show off my knowledge or skills with ended up lackluster. I was anxious about making sure my first relationship worked out and it broke apart.
If you hold sand in a fist, it all falls out but if you cup it gently in the palm of your hand you can hold on to a great deal. People and outcomes are the same. If you are too attached to them, you hold them in a fist and they will slip away.
And so I thank this friend for reminding me to stop grabbing the sand in a fist. Even though I didn’t like what he said, I am grateful that he reminded me of the great fall caused by attachment, as outlined by Krishna. I will not stop trying to hold the sand in my hand, but I can at least stop making a fist.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Finnish Differences

Time is a funny thing. It seems to move in leaps and bounds at times and at times it moves slower than molasses. Right now it's doing both. I can't believe it's only been a week and yet I can't believe it's already been a week. Sunset in Helsinki This week I've been in Helsinki for our Fulbright orientation. We learned a lot of information and it would be impossible for me to fit all of it into a reasonable amount of space so I will leave that summary for another day. But a week has given me some time to notice some differences in how things work in Finland and how they work in the US. I thought I would highlight five here that encompass a fair variety of my experiences so far. I have to give credit to my friend Marie who helped me with this list. Many of these are her ideas. 1. Nature is Everywhere This one is first because I think it is the most important one for Finns. Finnish people love nature and it shows in the way cities are built (at least th
5 comments
Read more

Small Acts of Love

A game of hockey going on on the river My boyfriend plays on a hockey team from September to May. It isn’t an official team—they don’t play games throughout the season and aren’t in any leagues—but they meet diligently every week for practice (he actually plays with two teams but it still isn’t clear to me what the difference is between them except that one team is better than the other). This requires some dedication because practices for both teams are either very late in the evening or very early in the morning. At the end of their season, before they take a break for the summer, the players come together and have a full-length game. I wanted to go last year and this year but wasn’t able to make it either time. Instead I asked him to send me a picture of himself in all of his gear. Last year he sent me a selfie of himself before the game, but without his gear on so I hoped this year he would manage to get a picture with both. He did not. I was willing to drop it, figur
4 comments
Read more

And so it begins!

Only 2 more days before I leave for my next adventure! Over these past couple of weeks, I’ve had a lot of questions and they’ve followed a general pattern. I thought this would be the perfect place to answer all of them at once. For the geographically inclined, Finland is far north right next to Russia. It is so far north that a fourth of the country is in the Arctic Circle. This means that this part of Finland experiences the midnight sun, when the sun never sets in the summer, and the polar night, when the sun doesn’t rise during the winter. The far north is also known as the Lapland. Turku, the city that will be my new home for the next two years, is in the southwest corner of Finland so my day and nights won’t be as extreme as the Lapland but it will be more extreme than what we experience here in the Midwest. My plane journey to Finland will be a total of nine hours, with a very short layover in Iceland. Once I land in Helsinki, I only have an hour-forty-minute lo
2 comments
Read more