Chains
Where a loss hurts, there you are bound
Anyone who thinks he is attached to nothing can easily check. John Climacus gives a one-sentence test: a man deceives himself if he says he is bound to nothing, yet grieves when he loses something.
Grief at a loss shows where your chain is. For one man it is money, for another a title, for a third the opinion of certain people. For most, it is not what they are ashamed of, but what they are proud of.
John distinguishes three renunciations. The first is of things. The second is of your own will: to give way where you would otherwise insist, when the matter is unimportant. The third is of the conceit that comes when you feel yourself to be good. Virtues watered with praise, he says, wither as soon as the praise is gone.
Your grief at a loss shows where your chain is.
Detachment is not coldness. Whoever becomes indifferent to his wife and children has misunderstood this rung. The family is not a chain, but the place where you climb. The chain is whatever pulls you away from it: work that would take everything, fame, the opinion of others.
The question remains: once you know what holds you, what will you do with the people and places that pull you back?
N. Ž.