Posts Tagged: detachment

“DON’T TRY TO CATCH THE GERBIL!”

Melody Beattie tells a wonderful story in her book The Language of Letting Go.

Her son brought home a gerbil to live with them.  Sometime later, the gerbil escaped and eluded capture for the next six months.  Melody and her son would catch sight of the gerbil, and would scream, “Catch him!”  However, the gerbil was still on the lam.

Finally, she decided to give up.  If the gerbil wanted to live a reclusive life, let him!

Shortly after deciding to let go of her attempts to catch the critter, he stopped beside her chair one day.  She very gently stooped down, scooped up the gerbil, and put him back in his cage.

She concluded, “Detachment works.”

Yes, it does!  It works for catching runaway gerbils—when they are ready to be caught.

There are times when I think that I am the gerbil.  I am afraid to be caught, not realizing that what I call “being caught” might actually be a better version of freedom than my own furtive hiding and eating crumbs off the floor.

But I want to take this in another direction: Fear is why we run and why we hide.  Fear is also why we want desperately to catch and cage certain memories, certain feelings, certain relationships.

Perhaps, in a sense, fear is the gerbil.  Maybe we—maybe I—try too hard to track down, corner, and cage our fears.  Maybe we should just let them run wild for a while, until we become more accepting our fears, and they become more accepting of us.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt famously said that “We have nothing to fear, but fear itself.”  Maybe we don’t even need to fear our fears.

Much of the evil I’ve done in my life, evil to myself, others, and ultimately to God, has been primarily caused by my fears and my desire to control them.  I’ve wanted desperately to detach from my fears, when maybe what I have really needed to detach from was my desire to catch and cage my fears.

My new life-motto is “DON’T TRY TO CATCH THE GERBIL!

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