I.73 — Gladness

This is a teaching of open hands, not empty ones, and an open hand is what joy needs.

Gladness comes as weather too, and the clenched mind meets it badly: either grabbing, so that the pleasure becomes a hunger for its own return, or bracing against its end, so that it is half-mourned while it is still here. Both are fists closed on a thing that only exists in the open palm.

So when it comes, hold it the way you would hold water. Let it be fully what it is. Do not begin the story about how to keep it. Do not rehearse the loss. Look at it the way you have learned to look at anything — plainly, in its location, as it is — and notice that looked-at gladness does not shrink. It brightens. Seeing is not only for pain.

Test this with the next good moment, however small. A meal, a light, someone laughing in the next room. Meet it open-handed, all the way in, for as long as it lasts. Then let it go the way weather goes. You have not lost it. You have had it, which is the only way anything is ever had.