Better To Have Loved And Lost
Published
Every philosophy promises a kind of freedom.
Some promise freedom through wealth. Others through discipline. Others through power. Buddhism promises freedom through non-attachment.
I've always admired that promise. I still do.
But I don't think I believe it.
Not because I think Buddhists are wrong about everything. Far from it. I think they're profoundly right about many things. Anger clouds judgment. Pride distorts reality. Ego demands battles that don't need to be fought. A life governed by impulse is not a free life.
In fact, one of the principles I try to live by is simple:
My judgment is stronger than my impulses.
That feels true to me.
But recently I found myself wondering whether there should be one exception.
Grief.
Not everyday disappointment. Not wounded pride. Not losing an argument. I mean genuine grief. The kind that arrives only after loving something so deeply that its absence tears a hole in your life.
Buddhism would ask whether such suffering is necessary. It would suggest that love can remain while attachment falls away. That one can love completely without clinging.
I respect that idea.
I'm just not persuaded by it.
Suppose a parent loses a child.
Imagine someone saying, "I accepted this possibility long ago. I remain at peace."
There is undoubtedly wisdom in such acceptance. But part of me cannot help asking another question.
How deeply were you attached?
That question isn't cynical. It's human.
Perhaps unfairly, we often see devastation as evidence that something precious existed. We don't admire heartbreak itself, but we recognize what it says about the love that came before it.
We say things like, "He was the love of her life," not because she recovered quickly, but because she didn't.
During one conversation, someone suggested two fathers.
One would be destroyed by the loss of his child.
The other would grieve deeply but ultimately remain composed.
At first, it seemed obvious that the second father was simply more resilient.
Then I realized something.
Resilience and love are different things.
A father may love his child completely and still possess extraordinary emotional strength.
That made me reconsider my own assumptions.
But only partly.
Because eventually another question emerged.
Can resilience become so complete that it begins to resemble distance?
At what point does invulnerability stop looking like wisdom and start looking like detachment?
I'm not sure anyone knows.
Perhaps Buddhists are right that love and attachment can be separated completely.
Perhaps they aren't.
The difficulty is that no one can prove it.
The Buddhist asks me to walk a path that may take decades before I can evaluate its destination. That is an enormous investment to verify a claim about consciousness.
I don't reject the path.
I simply remain unconvinced by its conclusion.
The older I become, the more I find myself believing something slightly different.
Judgment should govern almost everything.
It should govern anger.
It should govern ambition.
It should govern fear.
It should govern the thousand small impulses that quietly steer an ordinary day.
But grief may be different.
Not because it is noble to suffer.
Not because we should seek pain.
But because some things are worth loving so completely that their loss cannot help but break us.
That is not a failure of judgment.
It is the consequence of judgment.
A parent knows the risk when they first hold their child.
Every friendship contains the possibility of goodbye.
Every marriage carries the certainty that one person will eventually mourn the other.
Love is always a wager against impermanence.
And yet we make the wager anyway.
Not because we are irrational.
Because we have decided it is worth it.
That, to me, is what judgment really is.
Not avoiding pain.
Choosing which pains are worthy.
Perhaps that is why Alfred, Lord Tennyson's famous line has endured for more than a century:
"Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."
It is not merely sentimental.
It is a philosophy.
It says that there are experiences whose value exceeds even the cost of losing them.
I suspect I will never become an enlightened Buddhist.
Not because I reject discipline.
Not because I reject wisdom.
But because I cannot bring myself to believe that the deepest love should leave the heart unbreakable.
I would rather live a life where judgment governs my actions, where impulse rarely wins, and where—on the rarest and most tragic occasions—I discover that I loved something enough for my heart to finally break.
If that is the price of loving completely, it strikes me as a wise trade.