on attachment

In response to Graham's essay on "What You'll Wish You'd Known", an online friend mentioned that she might be having with trouble with grad school because she takes it too seriously.

In Graham's essay, he talks about how, if he had to go through high school again, he'd "treat it like a day job" and that "a day job doesn't mean doing it badly. It means not being defined by it."

I'm not sure Graham would apply that to grad school, but maybe he would. In another essay, on "love" (see, Doing what you), he says

If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if you're doing it wrong. That about sums up my experience of graduate school.

Hmm!

In this post, I just wanted to reflect on "attachment" and connect this seemingly Buddhist idea with how we think of school and our lives there and beyond.

When I think of taking things seriously and being defined by something, these days I often think about these ideas in terms of our attachments. I'm still learning what it means to be "attached" but I think there's great strength in not being attached while still avoiding the urge to be detached.

Make sense? Probably not.

The difficulty in being attached to something (or someone? I don't know) is that that attachment often forces you to take action unnatural. Being attached makes something a part of you, which often means you want it to always continue to be a part of you, and anything that comes in the way of that is a threat and not an opportunity.

For example, after talking to a soon-to-be-PhD student on campus the other day, I mused about if it'd ever be possible to return to campus in another way (in other words, as faculty).

My soon-to-be-PhD friend said that's pretty much impossible, which seems true if you think about it, but I am a dreamy optimist after all :)

And so, when I thought about the possibility of being faculty at this not-so-anonymous school, I tried to think about it without being overly attached to that possibility. In other words, whatever happens, being there or not being there will not define me.

(As an aside, I have to wonder if being able to say that something in the future won't define you implies that you have enough of some privileged Something in the past which was enough to define you then?)

At the same time, I don't try to be detached. (Hmm, I just realized that in the framework of attachment and polarized intent, trying not to be something is different from not trying to be something) When I say detached, I think I mean spending effort to not care about something, which seems about as effective as trying not to think about pink elephants or purple polar bears (thanks meebo girl :).

So, is "unattached" the third vertex in this triangle? Attachment, detachment, and unattachment? Maybe it's more like attachment and detachment form their own dimension (to simplify, as we can often be attached and yet try to be detached at the same time) where unattached refers to a slice of that spectrum, and orthogonal to that is the happy-go-lucky -charms dimension of optimism and possibility versus pessimism and learned helplessness.

What about identity? Ask me another day :). It's way too confusing to think about right now...