In Pursuit of Wisdom #4: How to Be Heroic, Right Now
We need to use our creativity and courage to cut through whatever is holding us back from being happy or being free. It’s as though we’re entangled. We may be entangling ourselves or letting others entangle us. We may even live as though we are saying “Please tangle me up!” We need both the insight born of meditation and the courage of a warrior to cut through the obstacles on our path and the ropes that entangle us. In the words of the first Zen teacher in Vietnam and China, Master Tang Hoi, “Letting go is the action of heroes.”
“Letting go is the action of heroes,” said Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh in his book, The Art of Living.
This is not going to be another piece analyzing passages from this masterwork of Buddhist philosophy, but the quote is worth mentioning as a catalyst to explain my journey towards understanding it.
If you read the above and thought to yourself, “What the hell is this guy talking about?”, you are in good company: mine.
How can letting go be what heroes do? Heroes see what’s wrong in the world and they take great pains to fix it — whether it’s a cat stuck in a tree or systemic political injustice. To be a hero is to not accept, to not “let go” of the fact that there are wrongs taking place in this world.
I could not wrap my head around it. To be heroic is to charge into the jaws of a dragon with nothing but a toothpick for a weapon and through sheer force of will coming out with the dragon’s head balanced upon it.
But…that is letting go. That is acceptance.
To even be in the process of charging towards the great, the terrible, those dark forces that inspire the freezing forces of fear within you, you have to let go.
To slay a dragon, you have to let go of thoughts that you are not good enough to slay a dragon.
To slay a dragon, you have to let go of the “what if?”
To slay a dragon, you actually can be scared. Your nerves are allowed to sear with hot anxiety. Those are natural human responses to being faced with a fire-flinging reptile. However, to successfully slay a dragon, you must let go of what is not and become one with what is.
How can you slay a dragon and at the same time think:
“Oh my God, Oh my God, this can’t be happening.”
“Why is this happening?”
“This can’t be happening to me.”
“I can’t do this, why should I do this?”
To let go is to fully accept the dragon as it is. By the time the dragon is mounted on your castle walls, it does not care for the trajectory of your life up to that point, and what you deserve or don’t deserve as a result. The dragon is here. See it.
The hero transcends thought, transcends anxiety. The tendrils of fear may be slapping his arms away from her sword or burying themselves so deeply in her legs that in hopes that they won’t embrace danger, but the hero lets go of that too. The hero does not have anxiety about having anxiety. The hero surrenders to what is: the dragon that is inside and the dragon that is outside. How can you start the charge otherwise?
We cannot change anything unless we accept it. -Carl Jung
I preach not as a veteran, a knight who slays dragons with one stroke of the sword. No, I am still in training, a squire that has had his fair share of victories, but that still fights against the instinct to surrender.
“Maybe if I fight harder and will stronger, I can shape the world to be the way I believe it should be.”
Peace is to let the dragon be exactly as it is before you fight it. Peace is to say the word “yes.”
“Yes, this dragon is burning down my entire village. This is happening. So then: what should I do? Who am I? What do I want?”
For once you have let go, once you have completely melded with the world as it is, you become the world. From that moment on, your actions are imbued with power. Realize that the world will change with you when you change with it. The questions “Who am I?” and “What do I want?” suddenly become the most important questions in the world — questions with the power to slay dragons.
“Who am I?”
“A hero.”
“What do I want?”
“To save the village.”
And so — you rise to the challenge. How could you not? You’ve let go of everything else but who you are, and what you want.
At that point, it doesn’t matter whether you succeed. It doesn’t matter whether you dine on dragon-flesh for dinner that night or if the dragon has a human-shaped appetizer— you already let go of that concern. For how could the dragon ever be slain if you never make the charge in the first place?
Whenever I fear or anxiety creeps up my body, knowing this, I now take stock of what I am resisting. Where is the tension, the fight against what is? Once I identify it, I consciously run towards it, literally or metaphorically. I embrace whatever thought I’m anxious about, sitting with it and boring into it with compassion. If I’m tired after a long day, not wanting to make dinner, I think to myself: “I’m resisting the fact that I need to eat. My body is asking for food. Let go of the workday. It’s not here anymore. Surrender to making dinner.” And through surrender, I nourish my body. Through surrender, I heal ills.
Heroism can be as mundane as post 9–5 rituals or as grandiose as slaying a dragon. But regardless, I believe that —
“Letting go is the action of heroes.”
