Some days I feel like my life is charmed. So many wonderful things happen, one after another, chains of amazing, wondrous events. I feel loved and warmly enveloped by the universe.

Other days I feel like I'm being tested. Change makes me uneasy to start with, and then so many things change all at once. People leave, places change, homes take on different feels as new people become dominant forces within them. Belongings get broken. Objects get lost.

It's such a trial, learning to let things go, to give up attachments. Things are merely things, but it is so easy to forget this. Emotions encase things, cover them in so many layers, and then after a time these objects seem to be so much more... and then when they reach their time, disappear or get lost or broken, what happens to all these emotions? How to let them go gracefully, also, to let them blow away in the wind, gently breathing a goodbye, rather than stir them up and drown oneself in them?

It all comes back to this mortality notion that I feel breathing down my neck now and again. Nothing is forever. We are all but dust in the wind. I want to be more than dust! But I am powerless, utterly impotent. These objects which are broken, they are each a bitter reminder of all mortality -- with time, everything and everyone I love and care for will be broken, lost to this world as well. And so will I.