I Don’t Give a Damn

“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” is a line from the 1939 film Gone with the Wind starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. It was spoken by Gable, as Rhett Butler, in his last words to Scarlett O’Hara.

I probably would not use such a profanity statement in my vocabulary, but if I have ever said “I don’t care” I can be sure that statement evolves around a convoluted expression of what is truly in my mind – I don’t give a damn. I am just not being real.

Whatever it is, can I don’t care? Can I don’t give a damn? I can’t not don’t care unless I do not know its existence. I can’t not say I don’t care about the world, as I need to know its existence before I can not-to-care. The moment I know about its existence it has already entered my space, so to speak. How can I not-to-care?

When I said I do not want to see you anymore, can I? You have never left me, though physically you did. I carry the anger towards you and thus I can’t not care, simply because that don’t care is stuck in my mind. The more I do something to get rid of it, the more it hangs on to me – the good news is that it cannot be get rid of. Like a boa constrictor, the more I resist the more I get strangled by it. Each time my anger increases, I am holding on to you more. But it is the other way round, my dear – my holding on to you is the cause of my anger. Arrrggh…. ! I may even resort to harming you in an unwise way. If I did, I would have got it all wrong. It is my anger that I am not seeing. It is my holding on to you that I have mistakenly see you as wrong. If I harm you I would have harmed an innocent being. I am actually harming myself. You did what you have just did and that is perfectly what it is. It is only my reasoning that I think what you did is wrong. And what has my reasoning got to do with you? My reasoning created my pain. How can you be responsible for it? When I held on to you, I am holding on to my sorrow.

Talking of holding on, when I love you I am also holding on to you. When I don’t love you, I am also doing the same. My attention is always 100% on you. What a delusion. Is there truly love in it? Can I caused you pain? Or can I cause others pain, except myself? The more I see myself, the more I see how ridiculous and comical the mind can be.

What I am running away from, I am exactly doing what the dog tries to do – chasing after its tail, not realizing the tail is its own. Whatever I don’t care, I am already caring it, unconsciously until I wake up to it.

The world has never left me. If I think an earthquake is a problem, the problem is me. There is no problem in earthquake, neither is there problem in death. As Byron Katie puts it aptly – whenever there is a problem I am always there. Nothing can escape my mind, unless I am oblivious to it. But the irony is this – whether I am oblivious or not, it has never left me as the world is me. Just like I will never know whether I will get jealous or not, until someone comes along. The jealousy is not caused by someone out there but rather a latent state awaiting its arising which I am holding on to. So when I am oblivious to what is, it does not mean that I am totally vulnerable to it.

The mind has no walls, neither are there windows. The mind is totally open to picking up everything that comes through the sense doors. There is no filtering, neither is there censorship. What changes is how I response to it. Since I can’t beat it, let me have peace with it.