“[The illusion that life is a property to be owned or an object to be grasped, that people can be managed or manipulated] sometimes puts us on the road to frantic search for selfhood and self-fulfillment. We want to be “true to ourselves” — or at least to our self-made image. We become so concerned with our identity that we preoccupy ourselves with our own unique distinctions. We worry about how we are doing in comparison to others. This is the illusion that sets us on the road to competition, rivalry, and even violence. For it makes us conquerors who will fight for our place in the world, even at the cost of others. This illusion leads some to nervous activism, propelled by the belief that anyone is only the results of his or her work. The same illusion leads others to introspection with the assumption that they are their own deepest feelings.

Awareness of how such illusions grip us often comes through a crisis or hardship. In the face of a great pain or inescapable grief, we realize how little we control our lives, how feebly our protests change reality. Something happens to make us realize we can let go of a cherished ambition, bid farewell to a friend, or accept an ailing body. We relinquish the hope of a marriage or career recognition that seems out of reach. We look in the mirror and admit that we are not strickingly handsome, not always the center of conversation at parties, not always brilliant. And we allow ourselves to remember that not only does life include losses, but in the end we will in some sense lose everything because we will, inevitably, die. At the same time, we sense that there may be much more to life than life.

Such discoveries remind us of our humble place in the scheme of things. They keep us from self-aggrandizement. Perhaps our need to hold life loosely is no more evident than in our daily relationships. Loving someone means allowing the other person to respond in ways you have no control over. Every time you engage yourself in an intimate, loving way with someone else you become at least partly subject to the exhilaration of hearing another person’s yes or the disappointment in his or her no. The more people you love, the more pain you may experience. For the great mystery of love is that while it can be recieved, it can also be rejected. Every time you love you enter the risk of love.

…

When we mourn, we die to something that gives us a sense of who we are. In this sense suffering always has much to do with the spiritual life. We surrender our striving denial of our limitations. We release our hold on a piece of our identity as a spouse, a parent, as a member of a church, as a resident of a community or nation… And so we admit, not without many tears, that we sometimes must let go of what we hold very dear.

… Many things in our lives matter intensely to us, of course. We cannot be whole without people to love and people who love us. We need food and places to live; we enjoy the company of a friend and the enjoyment of a book. But holding lightly means remembering that we are not what we acquire and accomplish as much as what we have received. The deepest joys come not from the money we earn, the friends we surround ourselves with, or the results we achieve; we are rather whom God made us to be in His infinite love. We are the gifts we have been given, not just the conquests we wrest. As long as we keep running around, anxiously trying to affirm ourselves or be affirmed by others, we remain blind to One who has loved us first, dwells in our heart, and had formed our truest self.

…Such openhanded posture may mean releasing our hold on certain prejudices. We are asked to surrender to a vision of God and God’s people greater than we now know. We may have to release some boxes that can no longer hold the breadth of God’s truth. We may need to develop another stance toward people we spend time with every day, or pass in our commutes to the office, or see on the news. Prayer, we may find, helps us see others as persons to be received, loved.”

-Turn My Mourning into Dancing, Henri Nouwen