Nothing Here Is Yours

Life is a zip line. You don’t get to choose when it ends — only how tightly you grip the handle on the way down. And somehow, most of us spend that ride arguing about whose zip line is better.

We die. That part isn’t up for debate. What’s strange is how loosely we hold that fact and how tightly we hold everything else — the flag we were born under, the god we were handed before we could talk, the name on our passport, the story we tell about who we are. We’ll defend a nationality we didn’t choose, a belief system we inherited before we could evaluate it, an identity we assembled out of other people’s expectations — all of it, to the death, sometimes literally.

But look closer at what we’re actually holding. Can you own your next breath? You can’t guarantee it. You can’t buy it, save it, or will it to your kids. It just comes, unearned, until one day it doesn’t. If we can’t claim ownership over the most basic mechanic of being alive, what exactly are we claiming when we say “my country,” “my faith,” “my people”?

I think it’s fear wearing the costume of conviction. Impermanence is terrifying, so we build scaffolding — identity, nationality, dogma — and we call the scaffolding “self.” It gives us a team, a story, a reason the chaos isn’t chaos. And once we’ve built it, we defend it like it’s load-bearing, because if it falls, we’re afraid there’s nothing underneath.

Here’s the uncomfortable part: there might not be. And that’s fine. That’s not nihilism, it’s honesty. You can live without owning any of it. You can love a place without needing it to be superior. You can hold a belief without needing everyone else to hold it too. You can have an identity without turning it into a wall.

The zip line doesn’t care what flag you’re waving on the way down. It doesn’t check your religion. It doesn’t ask your opinion. It just runs, and eventually it ends, same as everyone else’s. Maybe the only real ownership we get is the choice of how we hold on — loosely, curiously, awake — instead of white-knuckled and defensive, mistaking the grip for the self.

You don’t own your breath. Start there. Everything else gets a lot lighter.

Related watch: Living with Death, a short on the VenomWords YouTube channel.