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Bye, baggage

by Jack Tsang

When I moved flats last year I decided to throw out many belongings. The selection process was lengthy because I often hesitated on the items that had sentimental value.

When I’d finished this “give-up” exercise, I felt cheered as the spaces in my home and mind were released. The key was this was my decision. Throughout our lives, we re-experience losing things, usually involuntarily, such as stock losses when there’s a market crash.

From a Buddhist point of view, the world is never constant and everything we own is transitional, but we have an illusion of holding on to things forever, including wealth, health and family. We can only understand the impermanence of an object when it’s lost and it’s too late to treasure it.

When faced with an unexpected loss (for example, losing your job), a person typically goes through one or more of these mental states:

• Denial – “Impossible, I’ve made so many contributions to the company. How could I be fired?”
• Anger – “How could my boss be so cruel as to treat me this way?”
• Bargaining – “Give me a chance. I’m willing to take a pay cut.”
• Depression – “I’m worthless.”
• Acceptance – “Perhaps it’s the right time to take a break and rethink my career plans.”

Should you care about loss? If you don’t, then you may lose even more. If you do care, then you may worry about it happening.

We can’t avoid experiencing loss, but we can prepare ourselves for it psychologically. For people who fear loss or regret a past loss, I usually suggest they try this mental exercise:

• Imagine the potential causes for the loss (for example: “If your wife divorced you, what would be the main reason?”).
• Imagine the consequences (“Would you despair of losing it?”).
• Figure out what can be voluntarily sacrificed in exchange for something more valuable.

Jeffrey is one of my closest friends. He told me he’d had a lot of “failure” in his love life. The relationship with his present girlfriend, Sandy, is stable but he’s often afraid of losing her.

After working his way through the steps in the exercise above, he realised the major causes that potentially jeopardised his relationship with Sandy were his habit of over-spending and long working hours. Jeffrey isn’t willing to quit his highly paid job yet, but he has decided to eliminate his over-spending so he can save enough money to marry Sandy earlier than planned.

By planning ahead and giving up something less important now, Jeffrey feels he’s stopped himself losing something more important in the future.

He didn’t feel forced by Sandy into giving up his habit. In addition, their relationship has become more harmonious because she was deeply touched by his drive to make critical changes for her.

When faced with an involuntary loss, how should we respond? We should give up our obsession with the lost object. We may refer to the idea of “event realism” coined by Hong Kong philosopher Lee Tienming. He says an object that has once existed is immortal even if the object no longer there.

We know we’ll lose loved ones sooner or later, but we don’t have to give up our love for them.

Learning the wisdom that to give up is always a choice, we can make more room in our minds.

Jack Tsang is a member of the Hong Kong International Coaching Community (info@coachinghk.org)