Usually, when we enter into an activity, we hold some part of ourselves back from it. We engage, but with one skeptical eye, questioning whether we’re doing the right thing, looking for signs of trouble.
When we allow ourselves a feeling of abandon, we let go of this reluctance. We commit ourselves to action completely, without hesitation. In the emotion of abandon, we surrender our bodies to action, and place our minds beyond belief.
It is significant that this emotional experience is often described with the phrase wild abandon, suggesting that to feel abandon is to take leave of one’s civilized identity, and even one’s human capacity for thought, to become for a while like an animal, responding instinctually rather than conceptually. What we abandon ourselves to may be something outside of ourselves, but as we drop our defenses against it, we also allow something within ourselves to have free reign.
When he word “abandon” is used as a verb, it is not an emotion, but simply an action that we do to things that we place outside ourselves and then walk away from. To enter the emotion of abandon is the opposite, because it is to abandon one’s own self to something, to become for a time not merely connected to it, but immersed in it, lost in it, merged with it completely.
Dante Alighieri imagined that on the portal to the Inferno, the following words are inscribed: “Abandon all hope, you who enter here.” The action of abandoning hope is not a complete loss, of course: It is an exchange for the abandon of the Inferno. This is the terrible trade of abandon, to let go completely of all other things in favor of one pure thing, and be consumed by it.
