Something happens in the few seconds right after you get the thing you were waiting for. You have been through it a hundred times and it is still hard to catch, because by the time you notice, you are already looking at something else. The Katha Upanishad has a word for what runs through that second, and the word is snare. Let’s read the verse.
Children follow after outward pleasures, and fall into the snare of wide-spread death. Wise men only, knowing the nature of what is immortal, do not look for anything stable here among things unstable.
The verse makes one claim about outward pleasures. They do not hold still. It says nothing about whether they are worth having. The mistake it names is in the looking: something stable is being sought among things that are not, and the mismatch sits between the man and the thing he is asking to hold him steady.
A snare is worth a sentence of its own. It does not come at you. You walk into it on the way to somewhere, and it closes because you kept walking. Nothing in the verse says the children are doing anything wrong by following. The following is what closes it.
Look at what it costs to stay with the asking. The thing arrives, it settles nothing, and an explanation arrives alongside it: it was the wrong one, or it was too small, or the next one will do it. That explanation is available every single time, so no delivery can ever disprove it. The question of whether the weight was in the right place never comes up, because there is always a reason to ask again.
Look at the other move, which is to decide the thing is the problem and give it up. That answers a question about worth, and the question in the verse was about weight. The thing goes and the leaning stays, so the weight travels — usually onto being someone who does not need it, which is unstable in the same way and harder to see, because it wears the look of freedom.
There is a third position and it is the comfortable one: enjoy it, hold it lightly. Holding lightly is done with the hands. The leaning is in the legs. A man can hold a thing very lightly and have his whole weight on it, and he finds out which it was on the day it is taken, not before.
So what are we aiming at. We want to know what we are leaning on. The knowing comes on its own terms and it does not arrive with an instruction about the thing.
Let us see where this shows up in an ordinary day. Three places.
- The message you have been waiting for all morning comes in, you read it, and your eye moves to the top of the list to see what else is there.
- Something you saved for arrives, you get it out of the box, and by the evening it is a thing in the room.
- Somebody says the exact thing you were hoping they would say about something you did, and an hour later you could not place when it happened.
In all three, watch the few seconds just after it arrives. One question, two answers. Did that settle something, or did the wanting move one step along.
You are not deciding anything in those seconds, and you are not trying to want less. Watch whether it settled, and leave it as it is.