Understanding detachment

Some succinct thoughts

I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of detachment over the past few months. It must be said that detachment does not entail apathy. Rather, it is an intentional and positive decision to orient oneself toward the events in one’s life in a manner conducive to the maintenance of internal peace. This is what Saint Ignatius called Holy Indifference.

The uncertainty and instability of every human life demands, in some way, a certain level of detachment, lest we put ourselves at risk of surrendering any chance at internal peace we may have had. It is a fine line, though. How can one be both invested and detached at the same time? How can we care for something and yet simultaneously be indifferent to it? Well, we can’t.

I can’t, at least. Not by myself. Alone, I am at different points in time and in different situations both far too invested on the one hand and far too apathetic on the other. I should point out that I am mostly here concerned with outcomes. Processes are one thing. Outcomes are another. I think life demands that we be imminently invested in the process and almost wholly detached from the outcome. In my natural state, however, I am often too invested in the outcome or too apathetic about the process, or both.

Really I want to be addicted to the process and indifferent about the outcome. But that is fairly contrary to the sentimental and at times selfish nature of man. We take pride in our work and desire to see that work recognized in a positive way by others. We expect that hard work will result in success. This is not a completely disordered expectation. In fact, intuitively, it is the one expectation we should have, though we really only have one certainty regarding hard work paying off—that is heaven, and it is the logical end to a framework dependent on a just God.

Outside of that, though, there are no promises. In fact, given the fallen nature of the world, it is far more likely that our hard work will not often result in success (worldly success, at least). Given this, unless we desire to be constantly unsettled and disturbed by the unpredictability of outcomes, we should put our faith in the process and do our best to detach from the outcome.

This is only achieved by literally transcending our nature. It means looking at the events in our lives as something higher than a human does. To detach is to overcome the fallibility of one’s humanity so as to maintain a peace that is beyond any human conceptions of the word. That is what, I think, real detachment entails. Whether you think this helps prove the existence of something higher than man is up to you, but I find it intuitive that an action that entails transcending human nature implies the existence of something higher than man that he, whether knowingly or not, is imitating.

So then, it seems fitting to live in the world, to love the process. But we ought not be of the world—we ought not be concerned with outcomes.

DEO OPT. MAX.