Having an attachment is a deep and primitive sense. Attachment is not limited to people or animals or anything that can interact with you. Attachment occurs with anything, so this leads one to consider that if attachment is not about what is received, then what is attachment really.
Simply put, attachment is your side of a relationship. It is a complex set of thoughts, emotions, sensations, and reactions that only you experience in response to something you rely upon in some way.
That is why people hoard. Attachment is why people feel invested in their work, in their family, in their homes. So we can get the sense that attachment is more of an instinct once we look at it closely. This instinct is endangered when we lose or fear losing something with which with feel an attachment. People can behave erratically and dangerously when they perceive loss.
For example, the insulin pump you see above, was mine for four years until the company that owned the insulin pump decided suddenly to stop making it or any of its supplies. I cried like a toddler, literally. And this has happened each time I have subsequently lost my insulin pumps, due to them being provided by a study or no longer being able to afford the supplies. That is where I am now. Relying on needles just doesn’t feel the same. Needles are one and done. You keep an insulin pump for at least four years. It becomes a part of you. I used to hold mine and call it my pancreas.
Insulin pumps are a special kind of primitive attachment, because they have tubing and a site where you insert a plastic tube under your skin. The pump gives insulin continuously, and the whole set up looks much like an umbilical cord and placenta. I can only imagine that it in someway evokes the fetal memory of being safe and fed.
Each time I lose an insulin pump, I am born again, and again. Each time changed and more aware of my attachments (my set of experiences with other things and people) in general.
