The Way to Love: Meditations for Life

by Anthony de Mello

Once your attachment had you in its grip you began to strive might and main, every waking minute of your life, to rearrange the world around you so that you could attain and maintain the objects of your attachment. This is an exhausting task that leaves you little energy for the business of living and enjoying life fully. It is also an impossible task in an ever-changing world that you simply are not able to control. So instead of a life of serenity and fulfillment you are doomed to a life of frustration, anxiety, worry, insecurity, suspense, tension. For a few fleeting moments the world does, indeed, yield to your efforts and rearranges itself to suit your desires. Then you become briefly happy. Or rather, you experience a flash of pleasure which isn’t happiness at all for it is accompanied by the underlying fear that at any moment this world of things and people that you have so painstakingly put in place will slip out of your control and let you down—which it never fails to do sooner or later.