Aparigraha and Emotional Agility

by Nina

Flying by Melina Meza

A couple of people at the end of our block are hoarders. Both of them store junk in their broken-down cars, which are crammed to the rooftop with seemingly useless items like empty plastic milk jugs, old socks and even left-over food in takeout containers. So every time we walk by we think about this extreme form of a parigraha (acquisition). We try to enter the mindset of someone who can’t bear to part with any object no matter how unusable it seems, and imagine them thinking, “I might need this one day.”

One day when I was walking past the cars with my friend Julia, I told her about Ram’s post about aparigraha (see Aparigraha (Non-Hoarding) and Healthy Aging and how it inspired me to think about why it was so hard for me to part with the things in my attic I’d inherited from my parents and my husband’s parents (see Non-Holding) because it felt like letting go of the people themselves.

She replied that she thought another reason it was hard to get rid of things was it meant letting go of possibilities. It wasn’t just that you might need to use a certain thing one day; it was that your life might change and then you’d finally have use for it or that you might one day become the kind of person who would use an item like that. I thought that was quite profound. 

I’ve been thinking about aparigraha again because we’re having some electrical work done on the house that required us to temporarily empty out our attic.  So, once again I’m trying to at least reduce the items we’ve been storing (and, duh, not actually using). It was surprisingly emotional weekend because deciding what to keep and what to get rid of meant considering the significance of each item. Sometimes the item simply represented memories, as I wrote about in Non-Holding, such as my children’s old artwork or the CDs we used to love to listen to together. 

But I could see that sometimes an item represented a possibility, as my friend Julia said. And getting rid of that item meant acknowledging certain things will never happen. For example, at my age I'm not ever going to a Creative Writing teacher—even though I had a lot of people tell me that I'd be good at it—so I can get rid of all those graduate school notes. And those black leather pants from the eighties? Well, not only will I never fit in those pants again, but it’s unlikely I’d have occasion to wear them even if I could squeeze into them again. Sometimes getting rid of an item meant letting go of a certain fantasy about myself. All those classical music CDs I inherited from my parents—will I really ever start listening to them, even though I’ve never in my life enjoyed classical music despite liking the idea of it? So can I just let all that go?

Baxter recently defined agility—one of the four essential physical skills for healthy aging—as,“ having the coordination and reflexes to respond quickly and nimbly to physical challenges in the real world” (see Cultivating Agility with Yoga). As I was doing my asana practice today and cultivating my physical agility by doing Sun Salutations, I realized that by working on my aparigraha practice—my practice of letting go–I was cultivating emotional agility. There has been some uncertainty in my life lately, as I’m not sure whether or not Brad and I will stay in the house (or even the city) where we have lived for 28 years. I’m hoping that by getting rid of stuff that we don’t use along with some of my attachments to the past and fantasies about my future self, I’ll be able to respond more nimbly in real time to whatever arises. 

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