Free-fall with no ground
This is one of the most profound statements I have encountered recently, and I’ve been musing over it for the past week.
While some people live haunted by memories of past trauma, I’ve always been someone with a vivid imagination of the future and its potential pitfalls. As a perpetual worrier, I constantly make adjustments to the present, trying to avoid or minimize negative future consequences. This approach has served me well professionally, enabling me to deliver results through constant fine-tuning and adjustments. However, it has taken a significant toll on my health over time.
This statement about groundless free-fall has completely transformed my perspective. Why am I constantly worried about the ground? At first glance, free-falling without a parachute sounds terrifying. It conjures images of plummeting toward an inevitable crash — symbolizing the consequences we dread in life, like failure, loss, or regret. But the transformative twist is: there is no ground. Without a solid endpoint to hit, the fall shifts from a descent into doom to something entirely different — a weightless, open experience.
The fear of the future — and the constant planning it inspires — stems from our natural human instinct to avoid pain and seek safety. We’ve become hostage to a peculiar neurosis: using the ghost of memory to shield against the specter of tomorrow.
If there’s no ground, the elaborate safety nets I’ve been weaving through planning lose their urgency. This doesn’t mean the future ceases to exist; rather, it’s not a fixed destination we can fully control or need to fear. The future ‘ground’ is inherently unknown and cannot be controlled by our actions. Even when we encounter ground, it tends to be fluid rather than solid, requiring us to adapt to free-falling through different times and states. This idea resonates with Buddhist teachings about “groundlessness” or shunyata (emptiness) as a fundamental truth of life.
Embracing groundlessness means examining our relationship with both wants and needs. There’s a subtle distinction between wants and needs, and it’s often unclear when a want transforms into a need. If want is connected to desire, we must recognize how easily we become accustomed to desires until they feel like needs and evolve into hopes. True liberation, paradoxically, emerges not from fulfillment but from release — abandoning both hope and desire while avoiding the trap of despair. It’s about embracing uncertainty as our natural state rather than an enemy to be vanquished.
As the future’s grip loosens, so does the past’s hold on us. The past matters primarily because we use its experiences to secure a future. Our past traumas haunt us because we desperately want to avoid similar pain. Our traumas hold power primarily through our desperate attempts to prevent their recurrence. When there’s no ground to prepare for, these experiences become less constraining. This doesn’t negate the past’s lessons but frees us from letting it dictate our every move. The emotions we have been prisoner off, emerges as a palette of colors for us to immerse in.
Ultimately, this perspective invites us to embrace groundlessness as a liberating truth. The future isn’t a solid slab of concrete we’ll crash into; it’s an open expanse, ever-shifting and unknowable. We might recognize it as an infinite expanse of possibility, eternally unfolding. Life continues to flow, offering new opportunities to float, adjust, and grow. Life is not a destination but a journey. This understanding allows us to be more mindful of the Now and Here, opening our hearts and minds to goodness and enabling us to live virtuously.
So if we release our attachment to past memories and imagined futures, how should we live in the Now? But that exploration awaits another article, another dance with groundlessness.
Read the next article on Living in the Now:Planting the right seeds
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