Winnie Lim

Buddhist psychology is uniquely insightful, I think, when it comes to the specific version of clenching I was experiencing on that hillside path: how we make ourselves miserable, not just by railing against bad experiences, or craving experiences we aren’t having, but by trying too hard to hold onto the good experiences we are currently having.

Perhaps you’ve had the experience of reaching the end of a day on which you’d been unusually successful in getting your work done, or sticking to your fitness routine, but then instead of thinking “What a great day!”, you think: “That’s the kind of day I’m aiming for, and now it’s my job to make sure I keep on having more and more of them!” The result: you turned a potential source of easy delight into a source of further stress.

Spending your days trying to get experiences “under your belt”, in an effort to maximise your collection of experiences, or to feel more confident about the future supply of similar experiences, means placing yourself in a position from which you can never enjoy them fully, because there’s a different agenda at play.

 After all, it’s sad that a beautiful moment passes and vanishes forever, that you can’t stash it away for permanent safekeeping! But it’s the kind of sadness that might otherwise be described as “poignancy”: a feeling that deepens the experience you’re having, rather than detracting from it. The kind of feeling you get once you’re no longer grasping and clutching at the moment – thereby, ironically, driving it further away from you – but stepping fully into it, experiencing yourself as a part of it, being it.