> How can I practice detachment (buddhism inspired letting go) while simultaneously accomplishing goals?
I'd say that:
1) There's a reason for all the insistence on monasticism in Buddhism and many other traditions. Practicing otherwise is doing it on ultra-hard mode. You're unlikely to become A Buddha while having a family and 9-5 job, and that's just how things are. You can't have everything.
2) However—actions are inextricable from successful practice, I think, even in lay-practice. You can't think your way to enlightenment, you have to live it, and not just when you're meditating. And that's the hard part! Not all the reading, the listening, the meditating, the thinking. The doing. As Marcus Aurelius put it (quoting from memory, but quite close): "One can live one's life in a calm flow of happiness, if one learns to think the right way and act the right way" (emphasis mine). The thinking is the easy part. Acting in support of and in harmony with this blissful state, in the world, despite the necessary state of detachment is and always has been the hard part. That's why you can't just Do Buddhism (or anything remotely similar) from books and some part-time meditating.
I think the tension & contradictions between detachment and action is why it's so difficult—impossible, even—to record on paper what a state of complete enlightenment is in any way that fully covers it all on its own. You can't write the differential equation describing it. At best, you can just vaguely gesture in the correct direction.
(note: I am quite bad at the "and act the right way" part myself, so could be entirely wrong about all of this)
I'd say that:
1) There's a reason for all the insistence on monasticism in Buddhism and many other traditions. Practicing otherwise is doing it on ultra-hard mode. You're unlikely to become A Buddha while having a family and 9-5 job, and that's just how things are. You can't have everything.
2) However—actions are inextricable from successful practice, I think, even in lay-practice. You can't think your way to enlightenment, you have to live it, and not just when you're meditating. And that's the hard part! Not all the reading, the listening, the meditating, the thinking. The doing. As Marcus Aurelius put it (quoting from memory, but quite close): "One can live one's life in a calm flow of happiness, if one learns to think the right way and act the right way" (emphasis mine). The thinking is the easy part. Acting in support of and in harmony with this blissful state, in the world, despite the necessary state of detachment is and always has been the hard part. That's why you can't just Do Buddhism (or anything remotely similar) from books and some part-time meditating.
I think the tension & contradictions between detachment and action is why it's so difficult—impossible, even—to record on paper what a state of complete enlightenment is in any way that fully covers it all on its own. You can't write the differential equation describing it. At best, you can just vaguely gesture in the correct direction.
(note: I am quite bad at the "and act the right way" part myself, so could be entirely wrong about all of this)