Hello friends,
hope you are well.
I won’t ask you for the over hundredth time how was the weekend, it’s not like I can come out from the computer at your end to give you a hand, a massive hug or have a cuppa with you. I rather send you good vibes this way besides I don’t feel like this article is appropriate for that sort of question considering there are many people out there who are sick from COVID, have already lost people close to them recently and are trying very hard to cope on top of everything else that might be going on in their lives and so some of these people must have had a terrible weekend already.
I didn’t want to fall off to sleep on this very important article and so I am currently having a coffee. I am not a coffee person, it’s often an extreme exception or a very unusual relaxed moment if I do have one, but it’s not part of my diet, thankfully. I want to do you justice through this article and therefore on this exceptional case, I am having a coffee because I consciously want to be a bit more awake than how I was feeling at the first paragraph of this article. Feeling much better now.
Part of the reason that I was feeling not so one hundred percent was when I finished the first paragraph of this article I began looking and searching for something, in particular, from the days prior to me being stalked. A set of writings which I had from a couple of years back, say twelve and a half years back and one, in particular, described very well “detachment”. Some of you reading this article would remember that poem pretty well. I had a myspace account then and I posted that poem on there, it was a rose I gave my sister in the year two thousand and seven and for some reason at that time saying goodbye felt like a death and the rose which was meant to be a gift became the very sentiment of the goodbye.
You will find out why pretty soon. Ever since I left for travelling in the year two thousand I somehow was very in touch (I’m pretty sure you too have this skill) with the way I feel and when a foreign experience takes place for the first time I keep paying attention to myself to get more answers, but the truth is that I never thought I will feel this with family members because I often felt it when I had to say goodbye to people during my travels, especially the ones I really connected with. Bear in mind, we didn’t have the technology and means back then as we have today, so I relied a lot on my personal radars especially my heart.
When I gave the rose to my sister in the year two thousand and seven, a sad feeling washed over me, a goodbye which I thought would be very short term ended up being the longest goodbyes my family ever had from me. None of us knew there was an economic crisis on the way, or if South Africa was going to have a civil war with the increase in xenophobia and attacks, and so none of us knew that the next time they were going to see me was after five years for only ten days again. If there was a time, I felt like I was in a desert, or at least in an urban one alone, then that phase lasted eleven years with only an emergency ten-day visit in between to be with my family.
The reason why I can write about the art of detachment for the living and living dead is that I learnt about detachment the very hard way. I take you through the attachment phase and detachment phases in my books The South African: True Colours and The South African: Roamer which can be purchased online through Amazon and other books stores. This is just the beginning of it all. Over time detachment didn’t only end up being saying hi and bye during my travels. It began with a lifetime of memories that I realised couldn’t come with me on the journey to being who I am to who I was becoming and as the years went on some memories faded. The hardest bit was becoming detached from my very own family without knowing what a journey of a seeker and traveller involved, but life doesn’t give you want you can’t handle all at once so the detachments naturally just shed away as time went on.
Being a foreigner, I had to master it with the type of life I was presented with but I felt the true pain of the ordeal when all my sentimental valuables which reminded me of the places that I missed and the people that I’ve met and missed in my entire life up until that point (2009) were never returned to me even when I had the money and help to have it get delivered to me. Those sentimental valuables basically held memories which reminded me of people, places, certain times, times I’ve spent with others, and other specific memories etc. The person who kept all my possessions had every intention of keeping all my possessions. I was forced to bring all my possessions to the place which I temporarily rented out (his apartment) knowing that my stay could very likely be short-term. The possessions were safe where they were initially left all along.
Learning from the first mistake, my second one was less costly, but it still costed me. Being an immigrant or foreigner is tainted so heavily, but just that word “immigrant”, when in actual fact I was and am a person that came/come from a place where my country and us (my family) had less than these people yet our moral standards stood and still stands higher than some people whom I had the unfortunate pleasure of meeting but believe it or not, they had much more than me, and so it made no sense why they wanted it. Learning to live without my music and my very first flamenco handmade guitar from the South of Spain where flamenco music dominates the entire country were the luxuries I missed the most from all my possessions, while my family were the ones I continuously missed almost constantly throughout all the years.
I hope you now understand your partner better, especially if she/he is a foreigner with no support network around him/her. It’s not the same as the people who knew you from the time they saw you going to school and now that I’m back, it’s nice to know that there are quite a few people aware of the core of who I am, that person I’m talking of on the inside, you know. That can only be seen from the eyes of the innocent, that can only be seen from the eyes of people who knew and know the world we lived in, and what we never tried to hide… I’m talking of the authentic parts that people have seen over the years as we’ve grown up where one can’t spend their life hiding. There is less judgement there than entering as a different species of fish which gets dropped in a tank of water where fish of another species already have been living in for years, what happens, it creates ripples and a whole new story gets created, if it was a drop of water with foreign particles that fell into the tank then the good thing about water is it can’t talk, it can’t confront it just conforms. It is water, not a living organism, it has no relationship with the fish, just like the air has no relationship with a human being, when the human being is alive air doesn’t have an attachment and when the human being dies air doesn’t have a detachment. It’s there unconditionally, irrelevant who you are and what you’ve done in this world. It doesn’t miss you. – T. Dench Patel, 6 July 2020, 17:17
Let’s get to the part where I mention living dead in the title of this article, the art of detachment for the living and the living dead.
When I talk of detachment when it comes to the living dead, I can tell you that I was even at this side of the spectrum. You know when I tell you about those eleven years of feeling alone in an urban desert, there was a time where I was living for the sake of living, I just couldn’t seem to attract what I desired and I had this one dream (for some reason I think I had this dream twice) where there was a lion in a sort of a gladiator ring. This dream stood out because I remember how fuelled it was just by how I was feeling in the dream. If I was to make meaning out of it, this was the only meaning that made sense. I basically was the lion in the ring going round in circles but couldn’t seem to find a way out of the system, which in my case was the immigration system which kept me in a situation from not doing better or getting further in terms of my legalisation even though I was paying for it in terms of the years and taxes it simply wasn’t getting me anywhere on a new level. It held me, prisoner, to everything that I could have been or be at the time. This was the usual pressure that I just lived with day in and day out.
There was an extreme detachment, I felt nothing, I got to the point where I was numb to everything up until I chose to end the relationship in the year two thousand and thirteen (the relationship with domestic violence) which was the final straw of me feeling like I was just barely present in a body which was living dead, you couldn’t even get any sort of life out of me, no motivation out of me, this is how detached and dead I felt from all my dreams. If anything, it was my books that held me together, the idea that I can be the awesome writer I’ve always dreamt I will be one day, beyond even my own imagination. I believe the thought of living dead and becoming detached from the impossible things that I’ve made so possible was also beginning to die unless I leave the relationship that was killing me, and so it took a lot of courage to leave with just four hundred pounds in my pocket and no certainty. I took the leap of faith.
What happens when you have a healthy detachment?
You understand that your external world is a world you just play in, you understand what aspect of that world needs to be balanced with the internal world and that’s when you can cut through the illusion or basically the rubbish and irrational stories. You can see clearly from the outside what most people do, which is attach their external world with the false belief that it’s going to bring the most part of the happiness that they’re seeking. So, after learning to accept the losses it was like basically… what happened when I bought my first sports car, I was like fun, yay, cool, but I’m okay even when it has to be sold. I was sad the day I sold it, but I knew the next day it doesn’t buy me true happiness. I have fun with what man makes but it won’t define me. I mean, anything man-made is bound to break, get lost, may get stolen, collect dust, who knows… but anything sentimental is bound to last even in memories, see, like that guitar I talk about, it still lives in my memory, I spent years playing it, my guitar teacher bought it for her niece with the hopes that she was going to learn, and ended up selling it to me for a very discounted price. I held it dear to me because that guitar teacher taught me exactly what I wanted to learn, from a right-handed guitar we strung it to a lefty and not to mention it was the guitar that I visualised having before even coming to having it and what’s more, I played it exactly the way I visualised it before even ending up playing it the way I did. Healthy detachment is almost like, experience it, and if you have to move on from it, move on but let go all feelings of ever having a sense of happiness attached to that specific event, thought, thing, feeling or person when you have to leave that experience behind. It’s almost like a literal death when you have to go, you’re gone, the rest just remains behind. T. Dench Patel, 6 July 2020, 21:31
Detachment gives you freedom, knowing you can continue whether you have it or not. It’s the same. Knowing the currency of your happiness is the same with or without it. – T. Dench Patel, 6 July 2020, 21:33
To end I would like to leave you with more resources around detachment so that you can take other people’s accounts on it as well.
The Chopra centre – 5 steps to detaching for a happier life
Practising the subtle art of detachment
The subtle art of healthy detachment
From the article above I really liked this quote, “Detachment is not that you should own nothing. But that nothing should own you.” – Ali ibn abi Talib
How to practice the art of detachment in 4 steps
This came to me the next day after writing this article :).
You find the answer purely of who you were meant to be, why you were sent here the minute you have been detached from the false reality of our world. At that moment you will either step into your purpose or renounce it. – T. Dench Patel, 7 July 2020, 11:11
Look, man has created many things, but they all come with an expiry date, but God has gifted us with something priceless. We can’t see it or even put it in a casing to keep on a shelf for later, we can’t even touch it. This gift even enables man to make the most expensive product or experience in this world. Do you know what this gift is? Answer – LOVE – T. Dench Patel, 7 July 2020, 13:43
Let me know your thoughts. Drop us a comment.
Yours sincerely,
T. Dench Patel
Thank you for the comments and support. Thank you for offering to donate if there was a donate button on here. I prefer not to take donations. You can support by either purchasing one of my books (Paperback or Kindle), The South African: True Colours, The South African: Roamer or my children’s book Light. These books can be found on Amazon mainly and other sites in your country.
The audiobook for The South African: True Colours is available on iTunes, Apple and Audible. The South African: Roamer and Light will be released soon.
Note: Do keep referring back to this site as much as possible, as I grow, a more profound perspective may form and so I will always come back to each of these articles to re-evaluate them.
