I have been thinking about atta a lot lately, using various angles, but especially considering it from the perspective of my body and belongings: How I ignorantly try and use rupa to reify my sense of self and the reality, which LP Thoon says so clearly, that “anatta is that nothing belongs to us, it is meaningless.”

I have been homing-in on the feelings I have gotten from objects which, in the past, I considered to be mine; I have been really trying to re-connect with the feelings, to understand what beliefs drove the feelings and when/if those beliefs were proven wrong.

First, I considered the Porche: When I learned of a lurking engine problem, which resulted in my needing to sell it for a fraction of what I had believed it to be worth, I felt brought so low. I was ashamed. How had I so sorely misjudged my own item? It was like someone who had believed themselves to be special because they were beloved of their lover, only to find they were one of many consorts.

The car had always made me feel on top and in control. An affirmation of the me I saw myself as, the me I wanted to be. I can remember long drives, hugging curves, the sense of elation. Sure, it was fun to drive, but so much of the fun was me feeling the rush of being confirmed while driving the car. Though the confirmation was just me imagining the qualities, that I imagined in the car, were being reflected back at me. It was a circle jerk, an ego stroke of my own creation. Fun though it was when I could imagine the car broadcasting my awesomeness, the cost was that later, when I went to sell it, I felt like it broadcast my foolishness. All I needed to do was to understand the car doesn’t broadcast anything about me, doesn’t reflect anything about me, and I would have been spared both the false elation and the deflation.

In the end, with the sting of the sale experience, the car showed me what it really was: A decaying 4e object, not the thing of my imagination. And it showed me the suffering of trying to locate self in 4e elements that will decay, will fail us, will part ways from us. Which never existed to prove me special in the first place.

I fed imagination with the object, got high on the thoughts of the imagination, then got low on the thoughts of the imagination…but it was all just an imagination trip: The car was just the 4e object it had always been.

I thought about my wedding dress. The elation of trying it on at the last fitting, feeling so beautiful. A shining object of desirability, a catch to be coveted by all I walked past on the aisle. But years later the same dress made me look like a cow. The dress, so clearly unchanged, proved my body –squeezed-in to a dress that now looked like it might burst at the seams, itself had changed. Both a former body I had been so proud of, and a dress that had once fit it light a glove, proved my failing: It proved my inability to maintain a body that was firm, peak.

As I looked at the fat body-self in the dress, I felt a moment of shame; it was the cost paid for the moment of pride I had felt on my wedding day, all those years ago. Like the car, in the end, the dress told me both what I was (not special, not in control, not on top of this world and my life), as well as what it was — a piece of cloth that was stitched together and would be unstitched by time, helped along by a fat girl trying to squeeze into it.

In the end, all these objects that I claim and cling to part ways with me and, often, before they do, I am forced to a reckoning: Since I let the object feed my imagination in a positive way, it will feed my imagination in a negative way. I get forced to admit this object was never what I imagined it to be, it never confirmed what I wanted it to confirm. And me, still hungry for confirmation, feel the sting of disappointment before I go out in search of some new object to try and feed my imagination with.

The question I have for myself is why not fast forward a bit? If I can see these objects for what they really are now, I don’t have to end up in the moment of pain when the object makes me feel small by proving it is not mine, it does not confirm who I am.