Aparigraha, or: The Art of Making Space

In April last year, I went on a two-week trip to northern France with my parents. While they had one little cabin bag each, I brought with me an enormous, unwieldy suitcase that looked as if I was carrying around a dead person. My mom later remarked that she thought it symbolic, the way I dragged that suitcase all the way to Brittany and back home again. As if not only lugging way too much material stuff, but also a lifetime’s accumulation of mental and emotional baggage. Memories, stories about myself, ways of thinking and behaving.

My parents had invited me to join their trip, arguing it would be good for me to ‘get away’. I was tired a lot, crying a lot, my relationship ending, my sense of self disintegrating. I’d recently started therapy, but was also still in denial about the dire straits I was in and had just signed a contract for a way too demanding job. It’s fair to say this was not a particularly great time in my life. Since then, with help from family, friends, professionals, with lots of setbacks and periods of stagnation, I’ve been working on becoming more aware and letting go of some of the weight I’ve been carrying. I didn’t realise it then, but I was becoming familiar with the practice of aparigraha.

Aparigraha means non-possessiveness or non-attachment [1], and is a central tenet of Hindu, Buddhist and Jain philosophy (and many other spiritual teachings worldwide). It teaches us to not be greedy, to not hoard or covet things, for attachment to things causes us to suffer. For a mind weaned on consumer capitalism, this sounds ridiculous at first: shouldn’t we acquire (ever more) things in order to be happy? But the more material stuff we own – money, houses, devices, clothes – the more we want, and have to store, repair, protect. And the more immaterial stuff we accumulate – titles, relationships, memories, plans – the more we have to substantiate and keep safe. Ghandi wrote: "I found that if I kept anything as my own, I had to defend it against the whole world." Everything we own or wish to own eventually becomes a burden, the very things we thought would make us happy end up imprisoning us.

When I first learned about non-attachment, I thought it sounded extremely cold and boring, basically urging us to become lethargic vegetables who lived dull, grey lives and didn’t care about anything or anyone. And even though I’m learning to let things go, I am still a very attachment being. For example, I really love my home and everything in it: the books, colourful carpets, ornaments collected over the years and the stories they hold. I want to have money, safety, a healthy body. I’m attached to my history and my hopes for the future, undeniably dependent on nature, coffee, touch, and inescapably entangled with my friends and family. I’m very sure I’ll never live without any dependencies, and neither do I intend to, for I deeply value this intertwined living and believe it’s impossible to deny it. Sally Rooney must be writing about me in this quote from Normal People (great book, very attached to it): “No one can be independent of other people completely, so why not give up the attempt, she thought, go running in the other direction, depend on people for everything, allow them to depend on you, why not."

Why not? Should I not pay attention to my loved ones? Be indifferent to my own desires and dreams? What about elation, rapture, passion, enchantment? What about paradise? The paradox is that when we seek paradise, it escapes us. We turn away from and resist what we don’t want, and it catches up on us in a different disguise. We tighten our grip on things or people and wish for them to remain the same – our bodies able, our partners easy to love – but they change.

Isn’t non-attachment embracing change? Letting go of fixated ideas of how things should be? The corresponding paradox is that when we let go of controlling our experience of life, it tends to become more enjoyable. I used to think non-possessiveness was saying no: to things, to craving, clinging, but also to life. Now I understand it as a saying yes: to change, to life and my experience of it. It’s a continuous opening up, letting things flow through and transform. It’s making space, around and inside of myself – in that space meaningful things can enter and enrich me, like enjoyment, awe, connection. Things I dream of and care about can find a place to land and take root, to grow, without me having prematurely determining what I might experience with preconceived notions about myself or my life.

So, I think the question to ask is not: what can you get rid, but how open are you to change? It’s not the wanting or having that causes us the suffer, it’s our inability to let go and allow for change. Can I allow my carpets to fray, relationships to evolve or end, my body to get sick, heal, decay? I want to become, in the words of writer Sophie Strand, a compost heap, good soil. To not become hard or rigid, but porous, a place for transmutation. Weren’t we exactly that when we came into this life? Soft and dependent, open whatever life had in store for us. We also didn’t want for much. Our mother’s breast. A warm nest to sleep, a safe place to grow. The promise of a new day. Maybe the practice of aparigraha is not one we have to learn, but simply remember.

PS on remembrance: funny to think that the same suitcase I lugged to Brittany, was once part of a story of liberation. When I moved to South Africa, I’d sold or gave away most of what I owned and my whole life fitted into that suitcase. I felt light, liberated. How could I forget? But that’s another thing I’m learning to detach from: a linear understanding of learning. We live, we learn, forget and learn again, anew or in a different context.

[1] Aparigraha is the last of the five yamas, the five restraints in Hindu moral philosophy, or things we shouldn’t do. Next to refraining from harming (ahimsa), lying (satya), stealing (asteya) and misusing our energy (brahmacharya), the yogis ask us to refrain from attaching to possessions or ownership: aparigraha. The prefix ‘a’ means ‘non’ (like with ahimsa and asteya, non-harming and non-stealing respectively), and parigraha means possessiveness and is related to words like craving, coveting, grasping, accumulating, fencing off or clinging to.