What If It All Falls Away?
Why Presence, Not Prediction, Is the True Ground of Security + A contemplative exercise
Just this week, scrolling on Tiktok, I watched in sadness as a woman recounted her unraveling in tears. At 57, she had lost everything: her house, her savings, the career she’d built over decades— all happened in the last 3 years. Her voice cracked with the raw bewilderment of someone who had followed all the rules and still ended up with nothing. She wasn’t like soliciting for pity or help or anything. She was intending to document the rawness of her dire situation instead of waiting till she came out of it to share with her followers. If you’re like me, the comment visitor, I went to the comments to assess people’s thoughts. This was even sadder to experience. There were comments like, “55 here, broke.” “Same.” “Exhausted my retirement, too.” The weird resonance was immediate and haunting. In a way it was as though we were watching our own lives unravel, pre-lived on screen. Well, at least that was one story this mind came to.
There’s something uniquely disorienting about witnessing another’s collapse when you’ve lived your life believing in a kind of earned immunity. We silently think: “If I work hard, save, follow the steps, I will be okay.” But what happens when someone does all that and still finds themselves emptied out? And this could be even in an investment in a relationship, a project, a child etc. In hearing stories like this, it’s not uncommon to switch from empathy to panic. The mind may begin to ask: What if that were me? What if I lose everything, too? What if I’m already on the path and just don’t know it yet? It’s astonishing how swiftly the psyche transitions from witnessing to personalizing. The experience is no longer hers; it becomes ours. Not in solidarity, but in fear. There is a vulnerability beneath our skin we often ignore, until someone else’s misfortune lifts the veil.
I remember being the kind of person who would instinctively say, “God forbid” to stories like these. As if uttering the phrase could form a barrier between me and the chaos and unpredictability of life. As if those three syllables could cancel out the possibility of my possession, status or comfort. But life—honest life—doesn’t operate on magical phrases or positive mantras. And I know this is an arguable position, especially in the town hall of the law of manifestation cliques. What we forget is that life includes dissolution. The old structure falling apart is just as natural as the new one being built. The losing of some position is also as natural as gaining new positions, whatever these positions are. Sometimes both happen simultaneously.
These days, I no longer reach for optimism as a shield. I don’t pretend to know what tomorrow holds. Neither I nor any self-professed prophet can tell what tomorrow is apart from the clear understanding of the cyclical nature of life. But you see, there’s a strange freedom in understanding this. There’s a falling into deep surrender seeing the wisdom in this. And no, this is not a nihilistic surrender. It’s a kind of sacred openness. You see, if we can no longer rely on predictions, we are invited to rely on presence. That’s where the deeper trust begins—not the kind rooted in circumstances going our way, but the kind that holds even when they don’t. Oh, how can we, instead of laying our future tents of hope— our tents filled with the expectation that everything good that we plan for and hope for will happen to us, instead of holding on to this, could we instead hold on to the knowing that despite what happens to us, we are fine.
It would be naïve to say this trust comes easily. It doesn’t. I type this, I say this, I preach this, I have said this to people countless times and I still know it doesn’t come easily. In the tough situations where I’m encountered with loss, remembering this becomes the actual mantra. It demands the abandonment of safety as we’ve traditionally defined it. Safety, for most of us, has been tied to the material: homes, jobs, retirement accounts, identity markers. But those can vanish and will vanish one way or the other. Sometimes overnight. But then, let’s slow down and investigate this one thing: what remains when these things vanish?
To find the answer, we have to go beyond the narrative of personal protection and touch something prior to the mind’s stories. There’s a kind of peace not born of having our ducks in a row, but of seeing that even if they scatter, something is still intact. Untouched. Unborn. A presence that was never dependent on outcomes in the first place. This is not the kind of thing we can conceptualize once and be done with. At least, it hasn’t been like that for me. It’s a practice. A continual unlearning. Every time I forget and begin identifying with this finite body and fragile identity, I suffer. The world tightens. The walls close in. The "I" contracts into its smallest form. And I mistake that constriction for reality. But when I remember—really remember—that what I am is not the story playing out but the space in which the story arises, everything softens.
We are not separate drops in the ocean, said Rumi, but the ocean in a drop. Yet we spend most of our lives building borders between ourselves and the ocean of life. Borders that whisper lies about control. About permanence. About being able to outsmart uncertainty. We create entire models of self and universe on the assumption that we are the exception. Catastrophe visits others. Until, of course, it doesn’t.
See, the invitation I’m offering here isn’t to armor ourselves better. That would be the foolish game we have culturally erred towards. Perhaps it’s instead to disarm entirely. Not with recklessness, but with reverence. To stop trying to guarantee the future, and instead become intimate with the moment. Not to be passive, but to become rooted in something deeper than our plans. There’s a kind of rest available when we stop defending against life and allow ourselves to be held by it. Not because everything is figured out, but because we see that nothing needs to be. The body rests. The mind rests. And into that rest, a deeper question may arise that brings even more clarity: Who am I, really, without all these layers?
If we follow that question—not intellectually, but experientially—we may see that what we are is not fragile. That life, in all its wild unfolding, doesn’t need our constant supervision. In that place, trust is no longer something we manufacture; it is revealed. Quiet, unshakeable, vast.
Like in Rumi’s meditation, A Small Green Island(see below), we can learn of the imploration to the white cow. Like the white cow, we need to remember that the grass grows overnight. We need not make ourselves miserable by the fluctuations of the field. And this is not me trying to instigate laziness. It’s an alignment. It’s the recognition that the true Self—the one watching, witnessing, aware—has always been held, always been whole, even as the structures of life rise and fall.
Now, what if it all does fall away? That isn’t a question to fear. It’s a doorway. Do you see the doorway? Can you enter it?
A Small Green Island by Rumi
There is a small green island where one white cow lives alone, a meadow of an island. The cow grazes till nightfull, full and fat, but during the night she panics and grows thin as a single hair. What shall I eat tomorrow? There is nothing left. By dawn the grass has grown up again, waist-high. The cow starts eating and by dark the meadow is clipped short. She is full of strength and energy, but she panics in the dark as before and grows abnormally thin overnight. The cow does this over and over, and this is all she does. She never thinks, This meadow has never failed to grow back. Why should I be afraid every night that it won't. The cow is the bodily soul. The island field is this world where that grows lean with fear and fat with blessing, lean and fat. White cow, don't make yourself miserable with what's to come, or not to come.
Contemplative Exercise: The Receding Shoreline
1. Begin with this image.
Picture a coastline you've seen.
One with cliffs or rocks or sand slowly giving way over time.
You may not notice it day by day, but year by year, the shoreline changes.
What was once firm becomes soft. What was once expansive becomes thin.
Can I sit with the image of slow, natural erosion—without resisting it?
What happens in me as I hold this image?
Pause.
Let the image settle in the body.
2. Turn the image inward.
Now ask:
What in my life feels like it’s slowly receding?
Is there a role, a belief, a sense of control, or a structure that is subtly being worn down?
Don’t try to stop it.
Don’t try to repair it.
Just name it.
And be with it.
Then ask:
What emotions arise as I watch it change? Fear? Grief? Relief? Confusion?
Notice how those feelings live in the body.
3. Let the deeper question emerge.
From that quiet place, ask:
If the shore continues to erode, what remains?
If the “me” I know becomes less and less fixed, is there something beneath that stays steady?
Now pause.
Drop beneath the images.
What do you find?
Not the answer your mind wants—just notice what is here when everything else changes.
4. Release defense. Cultivate reverence.
Now consider this:
What would it feel like to stop fighting the tide?
What if I let life shape the shoreline without fear of what it removes?
What becomes available when I trust the changing form instead of clinging to how it once was?
Let that sink in.
The earth doesn't grieve the sand.
The waves don’t apologize for the pull.
5. Rest in the foundation beneath it all.
Say quietly to yourself:
There is something deeper than the sand.
Something that doesn’t erode.
Even as forms shift, I remain as the stillness beneath the waves.
Breathe here.
Anchor in that quiet.
Let the breath be your shoreline now.
6. Integration.
Ask:
If I lived with the knowing that nothing essential can be taken…
How might I show up today?
What can I let go of defending?
Let one insight surface.
It may be small.
Hold it.
Live it.
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