from a conversation today:  What are we attached to?  Looking at how attached we can get to our identities, our image, our narrative, to others' views of us; but also to things, things we want, feel we need, lust after, cling to, hoard.  Or fear.  We can get attached to success, to happiness, but also to pain, to suffering, as well as the future focus on those things:  wishing and hoping for the former, and fearing the latter. 

But it all just is, the good and the bad.  If we can remove the added layers of attachment we have to our experiences that comes from this ever-present future lens of hope and fear, then we are left with what is right now.  And the challenge to more fully experience it now, whatever it really is now, not what we hope or fear it will be.  And that is a different experience, often far less bad than we fear, sometimes more good than we let ourselves experience. 

There is often a developmental stage people get to in which they stop focusing on acquisition, and they start clearing out, cleansing, purging.  It's a simple cycle, eventually going out with what we came in with, for that to be enough, for there to be a fullness in the things that are there for us, without having to hold them, the things that are there for us, now.  Detachment, release, surrender, acceptance.