MacGyver is a brilliant life lesson

It took me awhile to realize, but then it hit like lightning - MacGyver is not just a TV show, it's a proper life lesson!

What, you don't see it?

Let's look at what one Shao-Lin monk once said. He mentioned first, how important it is to let go, even if it's really painful. However, in the west, he also said, people aren't TAUGHT how to let go, but instead, how to be as materialistic as possible.

People HOARD stuff so much, there's even a TV show highlighting or underlining this problem and how EXTREME it can become. Don't distance yourself too far from these seemingly crazy and problematic people; your own hoarding is probably different in degree only.

It's like people that talk their thoughts out loud - they seem very insane indeed, right? But listen to how much you talk to yourself in your own head - the only difference being, you are aware of their talking, because they do it outside the head, but are you any different, or is the difference only a matter of not doing it out loud? Then it's the same thing, just on a different mode or scale.

What does any of this have to do with MacGyver?

Well, if you condense down the CORE of this show and the character, many would say that it's his vast knowledge of chemistry and other branches of learning that allows him to 'do his thing', giving us amazing MacGyverisms that most people couldn't do.

However, when someone started talking about 'what would you have in your MacGyver toolkit', I started seeing how much it is possible to miss the mark.

At least from my perspective, the core ISN'T his knowledge, his ability to do all kinds of stuff, or remember all kinds of chemical effects and compositions.

The core of it is... letting go.

He doesn't have a toolkit, because he is the opposite of someone that needs one. Why is that?

He ACTIVELY refuses to take anything but the bare necessities with him, because it would HINDER his freedom to improvise on the spot, and it would imprison him to a certain, pre-planned path. It would crush the spirit of being in the now, it would destroy the possibilities there would otherwise have, and narrow everything from a vast space of infinity to a tiny plan made possible by the toolkit.

It's like an attacker with a knife has psychologically only ONE weapon, whereas a martial artist without any weapons has four. A knife is dangerous, sure, but in the end, it's only one weapon that you KNOW the attacker is going to 100% rely on. The martial artist has multiple weapons, so psychologically speaking, he's better equipped, paradoxically, with less added equipment.

The lesson here is that although it's painful to do the opposite of hoarding, it's painful to let go in a world that doesn't teach us how, ULTIMATELY, it offers us more freedom, opportunities, possibilities and pathways we would NEVER otherwise see.

We might mourn the loss of data, people, our own creations, childhood home and whatnot, but ultimately, when we lose external stuff like that ("How dare you claim my beloved aunt was external, we had blahblah..", I get it, but just shut up)..

..we are actually richer internally, because we're no longer imprisoned by the thing we had and now lost. When we return things back to the Universe whence they came from, we gain internal freedom.

"The things you own, end up owning you" is probably the wisest line I have ever heard coming from a stupid movie.

If MacGyver carried something, that thing would end up, psychologically and spiritually, owning him. It would weight on his thoughts, preventing freedom of thinking and any box would disable the ability to think outside of one.

In life, it's the same. As a good martial artist once said, "The poorer we are inwardly, the more we try to enrich ourselves outwardly" (I am paraphrasing).

If you realize my point I am trying to make in this post, it should click that this show really is a life lesson about letting go, not clinging to material things or pre-planned stuff, and just being in the now in a free mode, making yourself richer that way than you could ever be by hoarding things externally.

A Zen koan should fit here as well, "Poverty is your treasure. Never exchange it for an easy life."

Zen koans also often point to a treasure chest a poor man sits on, refusing to ever open it. That's all of us - we hoard external treasures without realizing how much better treasures we would have if we would look into ourselves instead.

The last point of this post to tie it all up into a neat, little package, is that in the end (more like a checkpoint in the grand scheme), we ALL have to lose ALL that we have worked so hard to gather, hoard, collect and save, even savour. No one can just call a board meeting at their deathbed to plan how they are going to arrange delivery of their material goods into the other side.

You can't take ANYTHING with you, except what you have inside of you. You, your thoughts, memories, insights, feelings, energy, attitudes, personality, etc. you can.