Whatever you have, whether a job or a business or even your children or love, is it really youRS? dO THE GREAT WORKS OF ART, LITERATURE, BUSINESS AND TECHNOLOGY bELONG TO ANYONE OR IS IT THE UNIVERSE WHICH COMMISSIONED THEM?

I wanted to write this post for a very long time. But, I did not want to write it in this form. The original idea was write about how a job never belongs to you. I would have talked about no matter how experienced you are or what your achievements are, whenever you take up a new job, you need to start from scratch and prove yourself over and over again. I was also going to talk about the benefits of having your own business where you don’t need to prove yourself to anyone.

But, the other day I was talking to my daughter about my achievements in life. Like every parent, I too want my daughter to look up to me and figure in her list of role models. My daughter kept listening to me boasting about my exploits. She looked at me and said, ‘mama, why cannot you do these things now? I would like to see you doing them!’

I looked at her askance and remembered how I used to react when my parents used to narrate their tales of accomplishments. My mother used to tell me how she could single-handedly ride two horses or weild a sword. But, I used to treat these as stories, because I could never imagine her doing all these daring acts.

All of us yearn to belong to something, even if those are our past exploits. All of us want something that we can call our own. And in these moments, the universe throws us a curveball!

Like the great writer Khalil Gibran said

The words we speak belong to the moment we are in.

The things we do belong to the circumstances.

We are just the medium through which our children come into the world, they don’t belong to us.

Our businesses, our works, our masterpieces belong to time. We are acknowledged once for bringing them into the world but that’s it.

Perhaps that is what detachment is all about, isn’t it? The ego desperately wants the world to celebrate its existence through its achievements. The ego wants the world to know that it exists. The ego wants power. But its greatest lesson lies in realizing that power comes through surrender. Think about it, nature never advertises its existence. The sun, the moon, the mountains, the birds, animals, plants don’t do anything to prove anything to anyone.

And that perhaps has been my greatest realization. We keep shouting in a bid to make the world notice us. We keep displaying our wares to the world to advertise our existence and importance. But, we don’t need to! The monuments you see, the advancements you witness do not belong to anyone. The great works of art and literature are not created to satisfy the ego of the author or the artist. They come through the author or the artist but are created by the universe. Who ever brings them into this world is just a medium!

The truth is we are just there to serve the purpose of the universe through our existence! In the end, nothing really belongs to us. As souls, we leave everything behind and are born again with a blank slate!