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Our hands were born to cling. To reflexively curl onto whatever finger was put into our small palm. To reach and cohere to whatever breast was brought to our mouth. To hug snugly to the leg that leads us to stand. We were born clinging. One could say, we came with strict instruction: “You will take birth and must find something solid to hold onto, for your very life depends on it.” We did not choose this impulse to cling, we came by it honestly, but just as the husk must fall from the blooming flower, we must learn to stop holding on so tightly, for it is the only way we will feel the sun of life, on our bare skin. Poet and essayist Maurice Maeterlinck said, “ The organism of the plant, thanks to an inconceivable miracle, seemed to foresee the need of passing through the grain state, lest it should perish completely during the severe season.”
If we do not outgrow our clinging, we will suffer the excruciating fate of being bound to our life but never allowed to take bloom. We will perish before ever feeling the warmth of spring. The missing part of the instructions at birth, it seems, was to find a way, once on our own two feet, to abandon that gripping that kept us alive at the onset. As if with glue on the tips of our fingers, we instead latch from one thing to the next. We are stuck on everything—the ones we love, the fear we loath, the pain we remember, the loneliness, the depression, the foreboding—spackled to our walls by our attachements.
I am a grown woman now, 39 years old. I have long been walking and standing on my own two feet, and yet, I find in many insidious ways, I am still firmly holding on to the same tiring little narrow winding paths. Fingers curled tightly. I know the feeling of being bound to something, the crushing discomfort of trying to remain concealed by the molting husk.
Starting very young, I began to fear my body— the illness of it, its inevitable dissolving, and death. After all, what else was I, then my body? I clung to this fear by vigilantly taking stock of daily ailments and discomforts. Over many years, the innocent preoccupation of a young child hardened into deep perfunctory roads of thought, laced with weary and solemn fear. I was living in a circle without light.
