On desire, ancient wisdom, and the freedom to choose.
The Unlocked Door
There is something about this photograph that fascinates me.
A solitary tree stands beyond an open doorway, rooted in a landscape that stretches toward the horizon. Behind the threshold is a room that may once have offered comfort, familiarity, perhaps even love.
But look closely.
There is no lock on the door.
Nothing demands that we stay, and nothing prevents us from returning. We are free to come and go as we please.
Perhaps the question isn’t whether we should stay or leave. Perhaps it’s whether we recognize that we have a choice.
And whether we understand the difference between choosing to remain somewhere and believing we cannot leave.
In Part II, we explored the lessons we repeat, the patterns we recognize but somehow continue to reenact, and the peculiar human tendency to return to familiar suffering.
But recognizing a pattern doesn’t necessarily free us from it.
We can understand perfectly well why something hurts us and still find ourselves reaching for it. We can recognize an unhealthy relationship, acknowledge a destructive habit, or see precisely where our expectations have led us astray.
And then do it all over again.
Why?
Because understanding something intellectually and releasing our emotional attachment to it are two entirely different accomplishments.
And nowhere is that distinction more complicated than in love.
There is a peculiar cruelty in some of the advice we give people about relationships.
If someone breaks your heart, you’re supposed to move on. If someone disappoints you, you’re supposed to let go. If someone cannot give you what you want, you’re supposed to stop wanting it.
As though the human heart were a kitchen appliance with an inconveniently placed off switch.
And somewhere in all of this, we’ve managed to confuse nonattachment with not giving a damn.
They are not the same thing.
One of the most misunderstood ideas in Buddhism is the principle of nonattachment. People hear the word and imagine some serene, emotionally unavailable monk sitting on a mountaintop, entirely untroubled by the messy business of loving other human beings.
It’s an appealing image, particularly if you’ve recently found yourself crying over someone who probably doesn’t deserve the quality of your tears.
But Buddhism doesn’t ask us to stop loving. It asks us to examine what happens when love becomes entangled with craving, possession, and our insistence upon a particular outcome.
And that is a very different proposition.
When Love Becomes a Bargain
Love, at its best, is an expression of genuine care for another person’s well-being. We want them to flourish. We want them to experience happiness, security, and peace. We can celebrate their existence without believing that existence belongs to us.
Clinging introduces a condition.
I want you to be happy, but I need your happiness to include me.
I love you, but I need you to love me in a particular way.
I can accept who you are, provided you eventually become the person I need you to be.
Notice how subtly the language changes.
The affection may be sincere. The longing may be entirely understandable. But somewhere along the way, love has acquired a job description.
It is now responsible for making us feel secure.
And that is an enormous responsibility to place on another human being.
This doesn’t mean that wanting commitment, affection, honesty, or reciprocity is somehow spiritually inferior. Those are perfectly reasonable things to want in a relationship. Having needs is not the problem.
The problem begins when we make our emotional survival dependent upon another person’s willingness to meet them.
There is a difference between saying, I want this relationship, and believing, I cannot be whole unless this relationship becomes what I imagine it could be.
The first is desire.
The second is captivity.
We don’t necessarily repeat painful experiences because we enjoy suffering. Sometimes we repeat them because we’re attached to the possibility of a different ending.
This time they’ll understand.
This time they’ll choose differently.
This time we’ll finally receive what we’ve been waiting for.
And sometimes, without realizing it, we begin loving the possibility more than the reality.
What Love Looks Like When It Is Free
But if clinging is not the same as love, what does healthy love actually look like?
This is an important question, because we can become so preoccupied with identifying unhealthy patterns that we forget to describe the alternative.
Psychology offers an interesting distinction.
Attachment theory, originally developed by John Bowlby and expanded through the work of Mary Ainsworth and others, describes the importance of emotional bonds in human development. In adult relationships, secure attachment allows us to experience closeness, vulnerability, and mutual dependence without constantly fearing abandonment or losing our sense of self.
This is not the same thing as the clinging Buddhism cautions against.
In fact, the distinction is rather beautiful.
Secure attachment says, I can depend on you.
Clinging says, I cannot exist without you.
One creates security.
The other creates captivity.
And the difference is not how intensely we feel something. Passion is not inherently unhealthy. Neither is longing, desire, or the wish to share our lives with another person.
Healthy love is reciprocal, although reciprocity doesn’t mean keeping a running tally of who gave more affection on Tuesday.
It means both people participate.
Both make an effort. Both can express their needs. Both are willing to listen, compromise, and acknowledge when they’ve caused harm.
There is room for disagreement without punishment, vulnerability without humiliation, and individuality without suspicion.
And perhaps most importantly, there is consistency between affection and action.
We often talk about love as though it were primarily a feeling. Something mysterious that happens to us, arriving uninvited and occasionally turning our better judgment into confetti.
But feelings, however extraordinary, cannot sustain a relationship by themselves.
Love also requires behavior.
Honesty when deception would be easier.
Consideration when selfishness would be more convenient.
Accountability when pride would prefer a compelling excuse.
And the willingness to show up, not simply when desire is overwhelming, but when life becomes ordinary, complicated, and occasionally unpleasant.
There is nothing particularly glamorous about emotional reliability.
Until you’ve experienced its absence.
Then it becomes one of the most beautiful things in the world.
But there is another dimension to this that I think deserves more attention.
The Search for Wholeness
Perhaps one of the greatest obstacles to conscious love is that so many of us enter relationships looking for something we believe is missing within ourselves.
We want another person to make us feel worthy, desirable, secure, understood, complete.
And I want to be careful here, because this isn’t a judgment about anyone’s emotional or spiritual maturity. Nor am I suggesting that people must achieve some enlightened state of psychological perfection before they’re qualified to love or be loved.
Good Lord. If that were the requirement, humanity would have died out centuries ago.
What I’m questioning is why we devote so much attention to finding the right person and comparatively little to becoming a whole person ourselves.
We have romanticized the idea of finding our other half for centuries.
What a peculiar concept, when you think about it.
Two incomplete people wandering the earth, hoping to collide with precisely the right incomplete person and somehow become whole.
No wonder relationships are so complicated.
But what if we approached love differently?
What if, before asking another person to become the center of our emotional universe, we spent some time understanding the universe we already inhabit?
Our fears. Our values. Our expectations. Our capacity for solitude. The wounds we carry and the ways those wounds influence our choices.
Not so we can eliminate every insecurity or achieve some mythical state of perfect self-awareness.
But so we can begin taking responsibility for our own inner lives.
Emotional maturity isn’t automatically bestowed upon us with age. Spiritual awareness doesn’t arrive simply because we’ve read the right books, attended the right retreats, or learned to meditate without mentally composing a grocery list.
And understanding a psychological concept intellectually doesn’t guarantee that we’ll recognize it in ourselves.
Self-awareness requires practice, humility, and the willingness to discover things about ourselves that we might not particularly enjoy knowing.
It also requires compassion.
Because the purpose of examining our patterns isn’t to condemn ourselves for having them. It’s to understand how they developed and whether they continue to serve us.
We are not responsible for every wound we carry. Nor is every painful relationship evidence that we somehow failed a spiritual lesson.
But as we become aware of our patterns, we may gain greater freedom in how we respond to them.
There is a contemporary term for something close to this idea: conscious coupling.
At its heart is the recognition that a meaningful relationship is not simply something that happens to two people. It is something two people deliberately create.
Attraction may bring us together, but awareness, honesty, accountability, and mutual effort determine what we build.
And that requires two willing participants.
One person cannot love consciously enough for two.
No amount of self-awareness can make another person emotionally available. No amount of compassion can substitute for reciprocity.
We can invite someone into a relationship built on honesty, emotional safety, and mutual respect.
But we cannot build it on their behalf.
Conscious love doesn’t require two perfectly healed individuals. It requires two people willing to examine themselves honestly, take responsibility for their behavior, and continue growing.
People who understand that love can provide comfort without being required to provide identity.
That intimacy can deepen our lives without becoming their sole purpose.
That we can depend upon another person without surrendering responsibility for ourselves.
And that another person’s freedom is not inherently a threat to our security.
Perhaps the distinction is simpler than we’ve made it.
We don’t need to become whole so that we will never need another human being.
We need to recognize our own wholeness so that needing another human being doesn’t become the measure of our worth.
Not two halves desperately trying to become one whole, but two whole people choosing to share a life.
And neither has to disappear for the relationship to exist.
The Stories We Fall in Love With
Sometimes we are attached not simply to a person, but to the story we’ve built around that person.
The possibilities. The unfinished conversations. The extraordinary connection that seemed to exist beneath ordinary circumstances.
We become attached to what happened, what might have happened, and what we are absolutely convinced would happen if only the universe would get its shit together.
And sometimes those stories are rooted in something real.
That’s what makes them difficult to release.
Not every attachment begins with an illusion. Some begin with genuine affection, genuine intimacy, even genuine love.
But a real feeling does not automatically guarantee a particular future.
Two people can care deeply about one another and still be unable—or unwilling—to build a life together.
That is one of the harder truths of adulthood.
And no amount of loving someone can make their choices for them.
We wait for the apology. The explanation. The acknowledgment. The return.
We convince ourselves that once the other person finally understands what happened, everything will settle into place.
But what if they never understand?
What if they understand perfectly and still make the same choice?
What if the resolution we’re waiting for is something only we can give ourselves?
In Buddhism, karma concerns intentional action and its consequences. It isn’t a cosmic accounting department deciding who deserves a happy ending or who is due for a spectacular comeuppance.
Our intentions shape our actions. Our actions reinforce habits. And those habits influence the lives we create.
We may not be able to choose what another person does, but we can examine the intentions behind our own responses.
And that examination can be uncomfortable.
Because sometimes what we’re holding on to isn’t simply the person.
It’s the belief that their return would prove our worth.
That their apology would establish that our pain mattered.
That being chosen would finally silence some old, familiar fear of being left behind.
Those feelings deserve compassion rather than judgment.
But they also deserve examination.
Our worth was never something another person had the authority to grant us.
And it is not something their absence can take away.
This doesn’t mean that letting go requires us to erase what happened.
An experience can be meaningful without being permanent.
A person can change your life without remaining in it.
A relationship can contain genuine love and still not be one you can—or should—continue.
The Buddhist understanding of impermanence reminds us that everything changes. Relationships change. Circumstances change. We change.
Impermanence doesn’t diminish love. In many ways, it makes love more precious.
We learn to appreciate what exists without demanding that it exist forever.
To hold something tenderly rather than tightly.
To remember without necessarily remaining.
And to recognize that loving someone does not obligate us to remain available for every version of their behavior.
You can wish someone happiness and still close the door.
You can forgive someone without inviting them back.
You can love someone and decide that loving yourself requires a different future.
But nonattachment doesn’t always mean leaving.
Sometimes it means remaining in a relationship without needing to control every aspect of it.
Sometimes it means allowing another person room to grow and change while continuing to choose the life you’ve created together.
Freedom isn’t always walking away.
Sometimes freedom is knowing that you can.
The Stories We Tell About Our Suffering
There is another peculiar thing human beings do when relationships become painful.
We become remarkably skilled at identifying what everyone else is doing wrong.
They won’t commit. They won’t communicate. They disappear when things become uncomfortable. They refuse to make decisions. They disappoint us, misunderstand us, and occasionally behave with the emotional maturity of a damp sock.
And sometimes every accusation is justified.
But there is a question we are considerably less enthusiastic about asking.
What role am I playing in keeping this pattern alive?
This is not an invitation to blame ourselves for someone else’s dishonesty, cruelty, or emotional unavailability. Nor does someone who has been mistreated become responsible for that mistreatment simply because they stayed. Fear, coercion, financial dependence, and other circumstances can make leaving extraordinarily difficult.
But where we have the freedom to make choices, examining those choices is an essential part of understanding our own suffering.
Psychologist Stephen Karpman described something called the Drama Triangle, a model of dysfunctional interpersonal dynamics in which people move among three roles: victim, rescuer, and persecutor.
These are patterns of interaction, not permanent identities or diagnoses.
And sometimes we move between them without recognizing that we’ve changed roles at all.
Consider the rescuer.
The person who believes they understand someone better than anyone else. Who sees the wounds beneath difficult behavior. Who believes that enough patience, enough compassion, enough love will eventually inspire the other person to change.
There can be genuine kindness in that impulse.
There can also be an uncomfortable kind of attachment.
Because rescuing someone gives us a role. A purpose. Sometimes even a sense of importance disguised as selflessness.
I’m the one who understands you.
I’m the one who stays.
I’m the one who can save you.
But what happens when the person we’re trying to save doesn’t particularly want to be saved?
Or when saving them would require them to become someone other than who they’ve repeatedly shown themselves to be?
We may begin to resent them for failing to fulfill the transformation we’ve assigned them.
And suddenly the rescuer feels like the victim.
The other person becomes the villain.
And the cycle continues.
There is a profound difference between compassion and rescue.
Compassion recognizes another person’s suffering and wishes to alleviate it. Rescue, when entangled with attachment, can begin to require that person to change so our investment in them will finally be justified.
We’re no longer simply loving someone.
We’re waiting for them to prove that our suffering meant something.
But there is another variation of this pattern, one that is considerably quieter and perhaps even more difficult to recognize.
Sometimes we remain in relationships not because we’re afraid of being abandoned, but because we’re afraid of abandoning someone else.
We worry about hurting them. We know how much they depend on us. We’ve become accustomed to anticipating their moods, managing their disappointments, smoothing over their frustrations, and adjusting our own behavior to maintain some semblance of peace.
Eventually, we become so practiced at managing another person’s emotional life that we begin to believe it’s our responsibility.
And perhaps, without realizing it, we’ve confused being needed with being loved.
My mother once told me that she couldn’t leave my stepfather because he depended on her too much.
What struck me wasn’t simply the sense of obligation in that statement. It was the unhappiness that accompanied it.
She felt trapped. Resentful. Exhausted by a relationship she no longer seemed to find much happiness in, yet convinced that leaving would somehow constitute a failure on her part.
And I remember thinking how terribly sad it was that someone could spend so much of her life attending to another person’s needs that her own happiness had become almost irrelevant.
But there is something else worth considering.
When we assume responsibility for another person’s happiness, we also surrender a remarkable amount of control over our own.
Our peace becomes dependent upon their moods. Our decisions become organized around their reactions. We begin measuring whether we’re being good partners by how successfully we’ve prevented someone else from being unhappy.
And eventually, we may no longer know where compassion ends and obligation begins.
There is a difference between being needed and being loved. And there is an even greater difference between loving someone and believing we are not permitted to leave them.
Family systems psychology sometimes describes this through the relationship between overfunctioning and underfunctioning. One person takes on increasing responsibility while the other becomes accustomed to having someone else manage matters they might otherwise handle themselves.
Neither person necessarily enters the arrangement intending to create it.
But over time, what once looked like devotion can begin to feel like obligation.
Obligation becomes resentment.
And resentment becomes its own peculiar form of suffering.
We tell ourselves we cannot leave because the other person needs us.
And sometimes that need is very real.
Illness, disability, caregiving responsibilities, and shared obligations can create circumstances that deserve compassion and careful consideration. Not every difficult relationship can be reduced to an unhealthy psychological pattern.
But even where those responsibilities are genuine, there is a difference between caring for another person and believing we are responsible for their entire emotional existence.
We can offer affection, compassion, encouragement, and support. We can honor our commitments and acknowledge that our decisions affect other people.
But we cannot live another person’s emotional life on their behalf.
And staying out of guilt does not necessarily protect anyone from suffering. Sometimes it simply transforms affection into obligation and love into quiet resentment.
There is something particularly uncomfortable about examining our attachment to being needed.
Because who wants to acknowledge that what we’ve called selflessness might also have become part of our identity?
That being indispensable can make us feel important?
That we might fear disappointing someone not only because we love them, but because we cannot bear the guilt of no longer being the person who makes everything all right?
None of this means the love isn’t genuine.
It means that love, like every other human experience, can become entangled with needs and expectations we haven’t fully examined.
And this is where Buddhism brings us back to the uncomfortable business of looking inward.
We become attached not only to people, but to being right, being needed, being chosen, being the person who understands, and being the person who finally makes everything better.
We become attached to the stories we tell about ourselves.
Sometimes we’re the one who has been wronged.
Sometimes we’re the one who has sacrificed everything.
Sometimes we’re the only person who can save someone else.
And those stories may contain a great deal of truth.
But they may not contain the whole truth.
Karma asks us to examine our intentions and actions, not simply to catalog the failures of everyone around us.
Not Who is responsible for everything that happened to me?
But What am I doing now, and what consequences are my choices creating?
Someone else’s behavior may explain why a relationship hurts.
Our own patterns may help explain why we continue returning to it, when we have the freedom to choose otherwise.
And until we can examine both with honesty and compassion, we may find ourselves repeating the same story, changing only the characters.
We can care deeply about someone without making ourselves the price of their peace.
And perhaps one of the most difficult lessons of love is recognizing that another person’s happiness is not proof of our goodness, just as their unhappiness is not necessarily evidence of our failure.
Love Is Not the Same as Attachment
Somewhere along the way, we have managed to confuse love with almost everything that accompanies it.
Longing. Desire. Jealousy. Possession. The fear of being abandoned. The intoxicating relief of being wanted.
We call jealousy passion, anxiety chemistry, and suffering proof that something must be extraordinarily meaningful. We mistake being unable to let someone go for evidence that they must belong in our lives.
And perhaps most dangerously, we have romanticized the idea that another human being should somehow complete us.
But what an extraordinary burden to place on someone we claim to love.
We ask them to heal wounds they did not create, quiet fears they cannot control, and reassure us of a worth we have not yet learned to recognize in ourselves.
Then we wonder why love becomes complicated.
But none of this means that love is not a feeling.
Of course it is.
Love can be breathtakingly beautiful. It can arrive without warning, rearrange everything we thought we understood about ourselves, and leave us wondering how one particular human being managed to become so extraordinarily important.
There is tenderness in love. Passion. Affection. The peculiar happiness of simply knowing someone exists in the world.
And sometimes there is longing, too.
We needn’t dismiss these feelings simply because they make us vulnerable. Nor should we confuse nonattachment with the absence of emotion. A life without longing, desire, or the occasional spectacular lapse in common sense would be a considerably less interesting one.
But love is more than what we feel.
There is a difference between feeling love and loving someone well.
We may not choose the affection that rises within us, the person who awakens it, or even the grief we experience when it cannot become what we hoped.
But we participate in deciding what that love becomes through our actions.
We can turn longing into patience or possession. Jealousy into honest reflection or control. Desire into tenderness or selfishness. Fear into an invitation for understanding or an excuse to deceive.
The feeling itself does not determine the outcome.
What we do with it matters.
And this is where karma enters the conversation.
Not as punishment. Not as some cosmic accounting system waiting to repay us for every broken heart or regrettable decision. But as the consequences of our intentions and actions, particularly the ones we repeat until they become habits.
When we respond to insecurity with jealousy, we may create the very distance we fear. When we seek reassurance through another person’s affection, we may become dependent on something neither of us can sustain. When we avoid an uncomfortable truth to spare ourselves pain, we may inadvertently prolong someone else’s suffering.
And when we mistake longing for love, we can spend years repeating the same relationship with different people, never recognizing that the common thread is the pattern we carry into it.
Buddhism warns us about clinging. Kabbalah reminds us that compassion requires boundaries. The cardinal virtues ask us to temper desire with wisdom, justice, and courage. Psychology shows us how easily the temporary relief of an unmet need can become a pattern we repeat.
Because karma is not destiny. Our past actions influence what comes next, but they do not eliminate our capacity to act differently.
We may not choose whom we fall in love with. We may not choose the first sting of jealousy, the ache of rejection, or the longing that persists long after a relationship has ended.
But we can choose what we do next.
We can choose honesty over avoidance. Compassion over possession. We can acknowledge desire without obeying every impulse it creates. We can love someone without making our happiness contingent upon their decisions.
And perhaps this is the great misunderstanding: that love should somehow free us from every uncomfortable human emotion.
It cannot.
But love can challenge us to experience those emotions without making another person responsible for them.
Love does not require the absence of longing, desire, jealousy, or fear. It asks us to recognize those feelings without confusing them for love itself.
And sometimes the most loving thing we can do is stop asking another person to be the answer to a question we have not yet been willing to ask ourselves.
Perhaps the karma of love is not simply whom we encounter, whom we lose, or who returns to us. Perhaps it is what we learn about ourselves through loving them—and whether we choose to carry that understanding into what comes next.
The Things We Reach For
There is another form of attachment that is considerably more difficult to recognize, because it often masquerades as affection.
Sometimes we aren’t attached to a person so much as we’re attached to how that person makes us feel.
We return to them when we’re lonely, disappointed, rejected, or uncertain of ourselves. Their attention reassures us. Their desire restores something in us that feels temporarily diminished. For a little while, whatever was hurting doesn’t hurt quite so much.
And perhaps we mistake that relief for love.
Psychology offers an interesting explanation for this. It’s called negative reinforcement, which sounds like punishment but is actually something quite different. When a behavior removes an unpleasant feeling, we’re more likely to repeat it.
The principle helps explain certain patterns of alcohol and drug use. What begins as a pursuit of pleasure can gradually become a pursuit of relief. Someone who once drank to celebrate may eventually find themselves drinking to escape anxiety, loneliness, shame, or the exhausting business of being alone with their own thoughts.
The same behavioral principle can operate in relationships, although romantic attachment and substance addiction are not medically equivalent.
A drink. A drug. A lover. Another message from someone who makes us feel desirable.
Different experiences, certainly. But sometimes the same uncomfortable question lies beneath them: Am I choosing this because I want it, or because I cannot bear what I feel without it?
And here’s where it gets particularly interesting.
The affection may be genuine. The attraction may be undeniable. Even love may be present. But there is a difference between wanting another person and needing that person to rescue us from ourselves.
We can become attached not only to the comfort someone provides, but to the version of ourselves we experience in their presence. More desirable. More interesting. Less lonely. Less ordinary. For a little while, we get to escape the person we are when nobody is paying attention.
And when that reassurance disappears, we reach for it again.
Sometimes the pattern becomes even more powerful when affection is inconsistent. A little attention, followed by silence. A moment of extraordinary intimacy, followed by withdrawal. Uncertainty breeds anticipation, and the occasional return of affection can make the connection especially difficult to relinquish.
One person may be seeking relief from loneliness or disappointment. The other may be waiting for that intermittent affection to become something permanent.
Neither necessarily understands the role they’re playing.
And there is another human being on the other end of that arrangement. Someone with hopes, vulnerabilities, and a life that does not exist merely to soothe ours. Someone who may believe they’re building a relationship while we’re building an escape route.
Which brings us back to the Buddhist understanding of craving, or taṇhā—often translated as thirst.
We thirst for pleasure, certainty, reassurance, and permanence. We want the beautiful things to remain beautiful, the pleasurable things to remain pleasurable, and the people who make us feel loved to keep making us feel loved.
But nothing remains unchanged.
And when we demand permanence from things that are inherently impermanent, suffering follows.
Here is the particularly cruel irony: sometimes the very thing we reach for to escape our suffering becomes one of the things perpetuating it.
We feel lonely, so we reach for someone who cannot consistently be there. Their attention brings relief, but their absence eventually makes the loneliness worse. So we reach again.
The cycle repeats, often long after we’ve recognized it.
And sometimes it repeats with another person altogether.
Different face. Different circumstances. Same unmet need.
We carry our longing from one relationship into another, convinced that the answer lies somewhere outside ourselves. Perhaps this person will finally choose us. Perhaps this one will stay. Perhaps this one will make us feel worthy of love.
But when a relationship exists primarily to relieve emotional discomfort, sooner or later the limits of that arrangement tend to reveal themselves.
The person seeking reassurance may begin to feel trapped by the other person’s expectations. The person hoping for something permanent may grow increasingly hurt by promises that never become commitments. What once offered comfort becomes a source of anxiety, resentment, or disappointment.
And sometimes we stay anyway.
Not because we’re happy. Not necessarily because we’re deeply in love. But because surrendering the relationship would mean surrendering the possibility of what we hoped it might become.
We confuse the pain of withdrawal with evidence of love. We miss someone desperately and assume the intensity of our longing proves the depth of our connection.
But longing is not always love.
Sometimes it is the discomfort of losing access to something that made us feel better about ourselves.
And perhaps the most difficult lesson is discovering that we can miss someone, desire someone, even love someone, and still recognize that returning to them would mean returning to a pattern we’ve finally begun to understand.
Because understanding a pattern intellectually and becoming free of it are two entirely different accomplishments.
Which brings us, once again, to karma.
The consequences of our choices are not limited to the people we hurt or the relationships we lose. They also include the habits we strengthen within ourselves every time we choose temporary relief over uncomfortable truth.
Each repetition makes the familiar path easier to follow.
Until, perhaps, we finally recognize it.
And choose differently.
Love asks us to recognize another person as they are.
Attachment asks what they can do for us.
And perhaps freedom begins when we learn to tolerate an uncomfortable feeling without immediately asking something—or someone else—to make it disappear.
Nonattachment is not the absence of love. It is the refusal to lose ourselves in loving.
Thou Mayest
I recently revisited the 1955 film adaptation of East of Eden, based on one of my favorite John Steinbeck novels. The story has also received a new Netflix adaptation created by Zoe Kazan, whose grandfather, Elia Kazan, directed the original film starring James Dean.
There’s something wonderfully appropriate about a story concerned with generational inheritance being passed from one generation of filmmakers to another.
Steinbeck’s novel is, among other things, a meditation on the biblical story of Cain and Abel. Across generations, the Trask family struggles with jealousy, rejection, resentment, and the desperate desire to be loved.
Sons inherit their fathers’ wounds, brothers become rivals, and familiar patterns of suffering emerge in different lives.
Sound familiar?
At the philosophical heart of the novel is a Hebrew word Steinbeck renders as timshel.
In the novel, it is interpreted as thou mayest.
The precise Hebrew translation is more complicated than Steinbeck suggests, and scholars have debated his interpretation. But as a literary and philosophical proposition, its significance is extraordinary.
Not thou shalt.
Not thou must.
But, thou mayest.
It is the possibility of choosing.
Steinbeck isn’t suggesting that we are free from our histories, our circumstances, or the consequences of what came before us.
He’s suggesting that those things do not have to determine what comes next.
We may inherit our parents’ fears. We may repeat their mistakes. We may find ourselves drawn toward the same relationships, the same disappointments, and the same familiar forms of suffering.
But inheritance is not destiny.
And recognizing a pattern is not the same as being condemned to repeat it.
This is where Steinbeck’s exploration of moral choice intersects so beautifully with our discussion of karma.
Karma is not an inescapable sentence imposed by the past. Our intentions and actions matter precisely because the future has not yet been entirely written.
We cannot always choose what happened to us.
We cannot choose whether another person loves us, understands us, or decides to stay.
But we can choose how we respond to the longing, disappointment, and uncertainty those experiences leave behind.
The Difference Between Loving and Wanting
For all the differences between Christianity and Buddhism, the two traditions arrive at a remarkably similar understanding of love.
In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes that love is patient and kind. It does not envy, boast, or insist upon its own way. It is not self-seeking. It rejoices in truth.
What interests me about this passage is what Paul does not say.
He doesn’t tell us that love is an overwhelming attraction, an uncontrollable longing, or the inability to imagine our lives without another person. He doesn’t describe butterflies, sleepless nights, or the exquisite agony of wanting someone we cannot have.
He describes behavior.
Love is not defined by the intensity of our feelings, but by the manner in which we treat another human being.
Christian theology calls this kind of love agape: a love concerned with the well-being of another, rather than merely the satisfaction of the self.
Buddhism approaches the same question from a different direction.
The Buddha distinguished mettā, or loving-kindness, from taṇhā, the craving that keeps us bound to suffering. Mettā wishes another person happiness. Taṇhā wants something from them. Their attention. Their affection. Their reassurance. Their presence. Sometimes simply the comforting knowledge that we still matter to them.
And this is where love becomes terribly easy to confuse with attachment.
We may genuinely care for someone while simultaneously needing them to behave in ways that make us feel secure. We may want their happiness, provided that happiness doesn’t threaten our own. We may insist that we are acting out of love when, beneath the surface, we are terrified of losing what the relationship gives us.
None of this makes our feelings imaginary. It makes them human.
But there is a difference between loving someone and making them responsible for our happiness.
Christianity asks us to love without selfishness. Buddhism asks us to love without clinging. Neither suggests that love requires us to abandon our dignity, tolerate mistreatment, or sacrifice our own well-being to preserve another person’s comfort.
Nor does nonattachment require the absence of desire, tenderness, grief, or longing.
It asks us to recognize those feelings without allowing them to dictate our behavior.
And perhaps the most difficult test of love is not how desperately we want someone to stay, but whether we can continue to wish them well when we recognize that we must let them go.
I think about how often we confuse holding on with devotion. How easily we convince ourselves that the depth of our suffering proves the depth of our love. As though the more it hurts, the more meaningful it must be.
But suffering is not evidence of love. Sometimes it is evidence of the things we have attached to love: our expectations, our fears, our unfinished stories, and our need for another person to become the answer to something unresolved within ourselves.
Love may be a feeling. But loving is something we do.
And what we do, not merely what we feel, is where karma begins.
And Steinbeck, bless him, reminds us that we still have a choice.
Sometimes that choice is the difference between repeating a lesson and finally learning it.
The Freedom to Love
None of this makes letting go easy.
We are human. We remember. We miss people. We imagine alternate endings. Occasionally, we revisit an old memory with the enthusiasm of someone deliberately poking a bruise to see whether it still hurts.
Sometimes it does.
Spiritual growth does not mean we stop feeling these things.
It means we begin to recognize them without allowing them to govern every decision we make.
We learn that longing is an emotion, not an instruction.
That love is not ownership.
That acceptance is not approval.
And that nonattachment is not indifference.
It is the ability to care deeply while recognizing that another person’s choices belong to them, just as our choices belong to us.
Not every connection is meant to become a lifelong relationship. Not every unfinished story requires another chapter. And not every person we love is someone with whom we are meant to build a future.
Some relationships teach us what love feels like.
Others teach us where love ends and self-abandonment begins.
And occasionally, the same relationship teaches us both.
Nonattachment is not the absence of love. It is the refusal to lose ourselves in loving.
Perhaps that is the real lesson.
We can leave the door to our hearts open without standing in the doorway for the rest of our lives.
We can be grateful for what was, honest about what is, and hopeful about what might still be.
Without demanding that all three look the same.
And sometimes, the most loving thing we can do—for ourselves and for another person—is to release the outcome.
Not because the love wasn’t real.
But because it was.
I think again about that photograph.
The room behind us. The solitary tree beyond the threshold. The landscape stretching toward a horizon we cannot quite see.
And the unlocked door.
We can stay.
We can leave.
We can return.
We can choose to share the room with someone who is equally free.
The past may explain us without having the authority to determine our future.
Awareness reveals the pattern.
Our choices begin to change it.
Thou Mayest.
Coming Next — Karma, Part IV: The Finale
The Life We Choose: Who Do We Become When We Finally Let Go?
