For my seventieth birthday, a dear member of our sangha handed me a book called This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom by Martin Hägglund. It’s a dense read — more philosophy than bedtime comfort.

And it’s had me thinking deeply about what we’re really doing when we take our seats on the cushion.

Hägglund is pretty tough on Buddhism. His main complaint is that most contemplative traditions, ours included, are looking for a way to become “untouchable by loss.” He even quotes that old Kris Kristofferson line:

Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.

For him, Nirvana sounds like bailing on all the stuff that makes life meaningful—love, grief, commitment, and the courage to actually care. He asks a sharp question: Do you truly want what Buddhism promises?

Do you truly want what Buddhism promises? 

The Buddha didn’t talk about impermanence to make us indifferent. He pointed to it so we’d stop sleepwalking through our days. When we really see how everything is passing, we don’t stop loving; we just stop trying to lock life in place. 

Jack Kornfield once told a story from his early days back home after the monastery. His girlfriend would ask, “What do you want for dinner?” and he’d reply, all serene, “Whatever you like, dear; it doesn’t matter.” She finally said, “But it does matter — to me!” That simple exchange woke him up to how “detachment” can sometimes be fear in disguise — fear of showing up and being seen. 

Real practice isn’t about floating above life; it’s about being right in it, honest and open.

So maybe freedom isn’t about having nothing left to lose. Maybe it’s seeing that loss is part of the package — and we can meet it with open eyes. This seventy‑year‑old body with its aches and creaking joints, the slower mornings — all of it just saying, this is life happening right now.

I find myself smiling at those lines from T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock:

I grow old… I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

There’s something wonderfully human in that, a bit of humor, a bit of surrender. We grow old, we roll up the trousers, and we keep going. The freedom that matters isn’t the kind that floats above it all — it’s the kind that stays real, that keeps showing up, even when the ground beneath us keeps shifting. 

Still here. Still breathing. 

Still paying attention after all these years.