We are wired in a way that we’d want everything in our control, closer to us. We want to keep a close look at everything, be it our jobs, our relationships, our opinions, our plans, as if loosening that hold even a bit means losing something forever.As life always changes and enters different phases with time, that tight grip becomes the very thing that hurts us. We confuse attachment with love and possession with commitment, and somewhere along the way, we forget that we were never really meant to own any of it.Detachment has had a tough image in our minds and sounds cold and distant, like someone walking away from everything that mattered to them.But that is not what it actually means. The deepest kind of detachment is not running from the world or showing you do not care. It is actually staying just there, loving people and chasing goals and feeling things honestly, while not letting any of it take a toll on you.Jay Shetty, a life coach and the author of ‘Think like a monk’, shed light on this with his wise words.
Jay Shetty (Photo: @jayshetty/ X)
Actually, the greatest detachment is being close to everything and not letting it consume and own you. That’s real strength
Jay Shetty
What does the quote mean?
Most of us hear the word “detachment” and imagine a person who is cold and checked out, the person who shrugs emotions nd feelings off and says nothing matters.But Shetty has a different perspective. He does not tell us to care less or to keep life at arm’s length. He is saying you can be fully present in your work, your relationships, and your ambitions without handing them the keys to your inner peace. The real strength is in being close to everything and still belonging to yourself.
There is a powerful lesson hidden in this idea
Attachment, as we understand, depends on something staying exactly as it is, an outcome, a relationship, a particular version of the future as we imagine.But the moment these things deviate from the usual, or from how we imagined them, we become unsettled.But detachment, in Shetty’s sense, means you can love and pursue and enjoy all of it while accepting that none of it is truly yours to keep. According to the same book, a monk’s mind treats everything, from our houses to our families, as borrowed.
Shetty was a monk himself
The line comes from Jay Shetty’s 2020 debut book, ‘Think Like a Monk: Train Your Mind for Peace and Purpose Every Day’, which went on to top the New York Times bestseller list. Shetty has not written about this from theory alone. According to his website, he spent three years living as a monk before one of his teachers told him he would have more impact by leaving and sharing what he had learned.
