The art of living is to know when to hold fast and when to let go.
For life is a paradox: it enjoins us to cling to its many gifts even while it ordains their
eventual relinquishment.
The rabbis of old put it this way: "A man comes into this world with his fist clenched,
but when he dies, his hand is open."
Surely we ought to hold fast to life, for it is wondrous, and full of a beauty that breaks
through every pore of God's own earth.
We know that this is so, but all too often we recognize this truth only in our backward
glance when we remember what was and then suddenly realize that it is no more.
We remember a beauty that faded, a love that waned. But we remember with far greater pain
that we did not see that beauty when it flowered, that we failed to respond with love when
it was tendered.
A recent experience re-taught me this truth. I was hospitalized following a severe heart
attack that had been in intensive care for several days. It was not a pleasant place.
One morning, I had to have some additional tests. The required machines were located in a
building at the opposite end of the hospital, so I had to be wheeled across the courtyard
on a gurney.
As we emerged from our unit, the sunlight hit me. That's all there was to my experience.
Just the light of the sun, and yet how beautiful it was - how warming, how sparkling, how
brilliant!
I looken to see whether anyone else relished the sun's golden glow, but everyone was hurrying
to and fro, most with eyes fixed on the ground. Then I remembered how often I, too, had
been indifferent to the grandeur of each day, too preoccupied with petty and sometimes
even mean concerns to respond, from that experience is really as commonplace as was the
experience itself: life's gifts are precious-but we are too heedless of them.
Here then is the first pile of life's paradoxical demands on us: Never too busy for the
wonder and the awe of life. Be reverent before each dawning day. Embrace each hour. Seize
each golden minute.
Hold fast to life... but not so fast that you cannot let go. This is the second side of
life's coin, the opposite pole of its paradox: we must accept our losses, and learn how to let go.
This is not an easy lesson to learn, especially when we are young and think that world is
ours to command, that whatever we desire with the full force of or passionate being can, nay,
will, be ours. But then life moves along to confront us with realities, and slowly but surly
this truth dawns upon us.
At every stage of life we sustain losses- and grow in the process. We begin our independent
lives only when we emerge from the womb and lose its protective shelter. We enter a
progression of schools, then we leave our mothers and fathers and our childhood homes. We
get married and have children and then have to let them go. We get married and have children
and then have to let them go. We face the gradual or not gradual waning of our own strength.
And ultimately, as the parable of the open and closed hand suggests, we must confront the
inevitability of our own demise, losing ourselves, as it were, all that we were or dreamed to be.