Does Life Require Attachments?

 During the group practice, we talked about life and death as well as the meaning of huatou practice. And one of the ideas that came out was this question: does attachment equate with life? In other words, does life somehow require attachments in order to perpetuate itself? I think the question is a bit complicated by the related question, namely, is 'perpetuating life' a value in itself?  
  I think that first and foremost, having attachments is not the same as loving life or loving in general. Attachment is more like a kind of mental prison that arises when a person objectifies desires. For instance, if I have attachment for a specific food, I invest energy into that food that is actually my own energy. It isn't the food that is saying to me 'hey, I am delicious'. Rather, it is the mind that endows the food with those qualities. Only through the right conditions arising in mind can food even be said to be delicious. If a favorite food is served on a nice plate, it looks appetizing, but what happens when the same food has been sitting outside for a week, and is served on a used paper plate? Without fully knowing the conditions that arise to create the experience, we must take the object as our own desire. But we don't recognize that it is only through the workings of cause and condition that something can appear desirable. Attachment is thinking that an object has a special power which is may or may not have independently of conditions.
    Can love or like exist without attachment? I think the answer is, yes, it can and does exist, because love is an awareness of the conditioned nature of our loved ones. Knowing that a person's child will grow up, change, grow old and die does not make them less lovable, even though they are subject to so much change. In fact, it's been said that the true marking of a love is that it survives the natural changes of life, through trust and a deepening understanding of self and others. But if I felt that the loved one has to stay a certain way forever (such as a five year old child remaining as a five year old), this would be attaching to a thought that is actually not meant to last. Rather than allowing the child to grow and my attitudes to change and evolve over time toward the child, I might end up fixating on the image I have of her or him at a certain time and age in life. I think that would be a kind of attachment, because it wants to fix our current state of being to that thing as though it were a permanent state of being.
   For this reason, I think that less attachment means more, not less, love. It means that I have more room to see a person in all their dimensions and to let go of my personal hang-ups about how I would like that person to behave, even though I might still have preferences in that direction. It doesn't mean that I don't desire the other person any less or wish them any the less for happiness. Rather, this love has an ability to be flexible, to grow and to account for all the stages, ups and downs of another person/people's life. I think that would be a love that grows with time, rather than diminishing when the conditions fade away. But that is another reason why contemplative practices (such as meditation) can help people to love better by offering a space that is different from the usual attachments one has. I am not even suggesting that one let go of attachments, but rather that a person makes room for other things besides attachment, just as an artist has room on her canvas for many scenes, colors and textures.
   On a certain level, I do believe that life itself is an attachment. I would say that attachment is an unavoidable aspect of life. But I think there is always room to cultivate more than attachment, and this accounts for the creative arts and other novel ways of being in the world. They are precious evidence that one can live through challenging oneself to see more to life.