I was in Zumba class, and I heard a song about a guy peering in the window of his ex's house; he was heartbroken that she was busy fucking someone new now. As I danced along, I started to think, “if someone can fuck someone new, was them fucking you ever really saying something about you? Did it make you special?”

I continued contemplating after the class ended. I landed on my beloved wedding ring, which I had lost decades ago: It ran off on someone else’s finger, so how is it that I ever thought, while it was sitting on my finger, it was saying something about me? About how loved I was? How precious? 

Obviously, on the new person's finger it didn't continue to attest to my beloved status. And, in my mind, sitting-on the founder’s finger, it attested to a morally degenerate person without the decency to turn in a found ring. The ring was a marker of ‘thief’ on the new owner’s hand. How can the ring mean different things depending on whose finger it’s on?  In short, it can't.

I have thought before about how people wanting me for sex didn't really prove anything about me, it proves only their own needs and desires that they are trying to fulfill with me. They are using my body. They are assigning their own meaning to it. 

It’s not just this physical body either: In the past I have watched Eric dotting on our little nieces. It has made me reflect that he, by his nature, is a caregiver, so naturally he wants someone to care for. I take it as some marker of my excellence, my worthiness, my specialness, that he has chosen to care for me. But this is temporary, when we part ways, he will likely find someone new to take care of. 

I had a friend, Abby, in our first year of high school, we were inseparably tight. But after a summer away from each other, I returned to her hanging with a new group of girls, not having the time or desire to spend time with me anymore. She had hung out with me because of circumstances, her wants and beliefs, what she perceived me to be -- at a given time. When circumstances changed, so did her attention and affection.  

Everything in our life just hangs with us due to circumstances: My ring hung with me due to circumstances, and when my finger shrunk in the cold, circumstances changed, and off it fell. My beloved Porshe, was my sweet, sexy ride in Cali, but when circumstances changed, and I moved to a cold climate, I felt like I had to sell and it no longer hung with me. My SF home, when I moved to NY, no longer hung with me...my money, once spent, no longer hangs with me. 

Its not just the fact that stuff that is with us can only be 'ours' temporarily. That is true, but it doesn't clear up the misunderstanding that shit can temporarily say something about us, it can confirm us at least for a little while. Like while I have the ring it says “I am beloved”. While I drive the Porsche it says “I am on top and in control”, while someone is fucking me it says “I am so hot and awesome.” And then it all changes and dissipates.  But what that assumes that even for a moment these things are ‘about me’, speak to me, rather than speaking to the circumstance in which we are able to hang out together temporarily.  It never was, and never is, actually about me; it is always that circumstances lets these objects, and people, be part of my life and then circumstances dictate the time and ways in which we part. 

Because I am attached, temporary though it may be, to the benefit these items accrue to me. Because I believe I can control the duration during which that benefit is accrued. Because I imagine the benefit outweighs the cost, or portends some desirable future.  I am stuck in an endless cycle of trying to obtain and replace. The result: Endless rebirths of dukkha. 

And if these things convey some identity unto me while they are temporarily there, their departure must also be an ego blow, a loss of the value and identity that I believe they confer. More dukkha. But if we are just hanging out, based on temporary circumstances, then no dukkha needs to ensue when circumstances change and we part ways. Coming together was meaningless, and so too is drifting apart.