We seem to form emotional relationships to everything, even to inanimate objects. When we lose those things that we hold near and dear, we feel like we are letting someone down, even if only ourselves. For many, human bonds bring the strongest emotional attachment so when we lose a friend or a lover (in this scenario I am not speaking of death) we feel the weight of the loss. Is some of that heavy or hurtful feeling from wondering what is next to go? Maybe it's when the next thing will happen? I think it is a combination of those two ideas and several others making us want to try and control life, as in: How can I keep bad things from happening.
We might continue going through several negative what-if scenarios. Some people dwell on what happened and wonder why they couldn't keep it from happening. Wondering "what did I do wrong," and "why didn't I see it coming" won't bring solutions and we can't move on from whatever we feel attached to.
We have attachments to a way of life like marriage, owning land and a house or being vegetarian or vegan. I am vegetarian and mostly vegan except for chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream when I am pms-ey and occasionally flavorful cheese from cows or goats. Now that I am poor enough to be considered as living in poverty and I truly don't know when my next meal will come or where it will come from, I have had to open up to the idea of eating meat again. If I have an attachment to the vegetarian way of eating I might become sad for being a bad person, angry that I am in the position to have to accept something I gave up over a decade ago, depressed that I may need to contribute to severely inhumane treatment of animals. I wouldn't say to someone who doesn't know I don't eat meat and they make a meal with beef or pork (or crab, turkey, etc) to make a whole separate meal because I can't appreciate the work they put into the meal presented. I do think that healthy animals are safer for consumption. I can't know that the farm the animal came from has healthy animals and I am not looking forward to ingesting sickly meat, but I will if I have to. I don't hold such an attachment on vegetarianism that it can't be fluid and that it has to be just so forever. I hope that one day more people will stop seeing money and degrade their product by cramming, but greed is also attachment. We have a hard time giving up what we attach to. We may not recognize we are attached or we will find excuse after excuse, also known as reason after reason why we need to make this thing happen.
When you understand that life is fluid, you see that you can have ideas and then that it is okay to build on those ideas, to keep them as a goal or something to work toward, and they are also something you can grow away from. That initial idea isn't how to make it to the end of life. You will make it to the end of your life, but if you stay stuck in trying to produce a specific idea of how you want things to be then you aren't growing with life. You aren't learning from life. If you are attached to a girlfriend, boyfriend, wife, husband, parent, animal, a plate, a house, a car, a 42 inch flat screen LED TV, time with friends...If you hold onto an idea on how any of the things you hold attachment to need to stay in your life forever, then you will let yourself down each time you are forced to give up the thing, tangible or not. Most things aren't going to turn out how you want them to. Enjoy the uncertainty of life. Know that all relationships end and you aren't a bad person for its ending. You can try to control things, you may think you're controlling aspects of life very well, but it will end and by that I mean backfire. You're on the way to being a better person if you can learn and grow from the relationship that ended. Instead of dwelling with thoughts like "why did this happen to me," find anything good from the relationship to focus on. When we focus on the positive rather than the negative, we can move on from what we are attached to. You don't need that thing to be happy. You can continue being happy with any loss you face in life.
To be detached doesn't have to mean you are uncaring. It can mean you care for yourself, maybe you care for that thing or person so you can let it go when it leaves your hands because you know it will enrich another life, or maybe it just didn't work for you.
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