Call it shedding or ego death or whatever you like; all it means is that nothing is personal and you realize it.

To be fair, we must take things personally on some level just to survive. Fear is justifiably triggered when we sense loss or death. Perpetuation of the species has put fear in our nature, our program. Just try to escape fear. Leave your mind empty. Watch the little periscope rise, searching for the next threat, inventing what it cannot find.

We will always fear, but we don’t have to give it our attention.

Ownership, our sense of entitlement and consequent duty, has built our fear response to a level that is, mildly put, inappropriate. Somehow we’ve evolved to think we can own every and any thing.

We know full well where the story ends. We run from the one certainty of life, which is death.

Look at the surface of a stream, a river, a creek, a lake, a sea, an ocean. Do you think it stays the same because your eyes tell you so? Your mind knows better. Your soul knows better. But, still, we call it something, this moving water, as if it’s stagnant and unique. We view and label it as constant, knowing that it is ever changing. I think there is some Buddha quote that states that observation in a more eloquent way, but I can’t remember it.

We think we are still. We think the change is happening, somehow, to us. To *me.* Nothing can happen to me that hasn’t happened to someone else who handled it much better than I do/did. We are moving. Look at the clouds move in the sky. The future is behind us and the past far ahead.

We aren’t the agent of change in our world. We aren’t the victim of change in our world. I read somewhere that Fate has the say in one to three of four factors in a given situation. Freewill fills the rest. We provide a place for balance.

I have no personal karma. Nothing, not even God, is personal. And Fate, with one to three of the four, will make sure I learn my lesson, one way or another, one life or another.

Does “nothing personal” mean we don’t own? We don’t affect? We don’t love? No. It means we own and affect everything. Love…

We can’t help but bump and stumble upon each other. We are the teachers. We are the lesson.