Losing someone hurts in a way that has no words.
It is a weight that sits in your chest. It follows you through your days and keeps you awake at night. It is a kind of pain that makes you wonder if you will ever feel whole again.
I have felt this pain.
We tell ourselves we are loving people when we hold them close. But somewhere, without noticing, love turns into fear. We start needing them to stay. We start building our entire sense of safety around their presence.
Then, we spend our days terrified of the moment they leave.
This is what the Buddha meant when he said attachment is the root of all suffering.
Not that we should not love. But we should notice the difference between loving someone and needing to own their permanence.
I learned this the hard way. I once loved someone so much that I forgot where I ended and they began. Every good thing in my life felt good because they were there, always beside me. Every hard thing felt impossible because I was afraid of facing it without them. I did not just love them. I made them responsible for my happiness.
And when they left, I did not just lose them. I lost myself.
The grief was not only about missing a loved one. It was about the collapse of everything I thought I was. Because I had built my entire world on the idea that they would stay.
When that idea crumbled, so did I.
This is the suffering that attachment brings. We do not suffer because we love. We suffer because we cling. We suffer because we mistake people for anchors when they are really just fellow travellers on a path that keeps moving.
The truth is, nothing in this life is ours to keep.
Not people. Not moments. Not even the version of ourselves we are right now.
Everything is passing through. Everything is changing. And the more we try to freeze life in place, the more we hurt when it flows on, inevitably.
But here is something I want to tell you right now. Something took me years and hard lessons to understand.
Letting go does not mean we stop loving. It means we love differently. It means we learn to hold people with an open hand instead of a closed fist.
When you hold someone with a closed fist, you are saying: I need you to stay or I will break. When you hold someone with an open hand, you are saying: I am grateful you are here. And I will still be okay when you are not.
This is truly, definitely, completely, HARD. I will not pretend it is easy.
It goes against everything we have been taught about love. We have been told that love means forever. That love means holding on no matter what. That if we really love someone, we should never let them go.
But life does not work that way. People leave. People change. People die. And if our happiness depends entirely on them staying exactly as they are, we will spend our whole lives suffering.
The Buddha understood this. He saw that impermanence is not the problem. Our resistance to impermanence is the problem.
The river is beautiful because it flows. The seasons are beautiful because they change. And people are beautiful because they are here for a time, not forever.
Attachment is the root of all suffering…
When I was reminded of the Buddha’s words, something softened in me. Yup, cause I’m still just an ordinary person with so much attachment in my heart, this awakening often happens only in a moment. But in that moment, I stopped trying to control things I could never control. I stopped demanding that life give me guarantees. I understood that this lesson of loss appeared so I would start learning to be with people fully while they were here, without the constant fear of losing them.
This does not mean the sadness goes away. When someone leaves, it still hurts so much, you know. When things change, it still feels like loss. But the suffering is different now. It is quite clean. It is grief without the added weight of “this should not be happening” or “I cannot survive this“.
Because the truth is, you can survive this. You have survived every loss before this one. And you will survive the ones that come after.
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Attachment is the root of all suffering because it teaches us to fear change instead of trusting it. It teaches us to grip tightly instead of holding gently. It teaches us that love means permanence when, really, love means presence.
So maybe the practice is this: Notice when your hands are clenching. Notice when you are trying to make something stay that is ready to go. Notice when you are suffering not from loss itself, but from your resistance to loss.
And then, as gently as you can, soften. Breathe. Let your hands open just a little.
The people we love are still rivers. They were always rivers. And we can stand at the bank and be grateful for the water that flows past, or we can exhaust ourselves trying to hold it in our hands.
Either way, the river keeps moving. But only one of those choices lets you enjoy its beauty while it is here.
That is where peace lives. Not in making things permanent. But in learning to love them anyway.
Jasmine.
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