A SINGLE IMPRESSIVE ENTERPRISE

I’ve been looser and less tense these last few years, partly because I’ve finally begun to outgrow a life-long belief about the nature of life. From my earliest memory, it was impressed upon me (by family, friends, the media, and the overall culture) that life consists of multitudinous numbers of essentially separate entities, situations, and events, all of which are competing with each other. Life, as I learned it growing up, was a continuous conflict among countless hostile elements. My main responsibility, I believed, was to save myself from harm and try to triumph in as many of the daily contests as possible. Now, however, after 71 years  of sorting things out, I’ve slowly come to understand that this view of reality is simply wrong. I see now that, instead of being “many”, the universe is just one. It’s not a confused collection of disparate material entities, but rather a single, cohesive, and harmonious expression of itself. The entire universe, I see now, is as unified as a single cell, and, as in a cell, everything that happens in the universe happens for the good of itself. What this means for me is that I should cease from my nonstop stressing and struggling, because there’s no other “thing” that’s out to hurt “me”. In fact, there’s no “other”, period, and no separate “me”. There’s just the one shared and always successful universe, of which I and everyone and all of our so-called problems are a part. We’re all essential components of a single impressive enterprise called Life (of which death is another essential part), as closely interlaced with each other as the workings of a cell. 
For me, this realization has called for much more loosening up in my life than struggling.