Maya: The Illusion of Ownership

Do you ever find yourself treating a public parking spot as if it were your own — oddly satisfied when it's free, visibly upset when it's taken?

Last weekend, going up the escalator at the metro station closest to my current home, I caught myself thinking: I have some sort of ownership of this place. Not belonging, exactly — something just short of it. A milder version of the instinct a child has after grabbing a toy in a supermarket.

I sat with that feeling on the train. It isn't ownership in any real sense. It's quieter than that, almost instinctive. Perhaps it comes from familiarity — the repetition of passing through the same space, the rhythm of journeys starting and ending there.

Like me, many people save it on the map as "home metro station." Somewhere along the way, usage begins to blur into ownership.

I've felt it elsewhere too. A favorite parking spot that brings a small happiness when it's free — and a surprising sense of loss when it isn't. A bench in the park. A corner in the coffee shop. A seat at the family dining table.

And it doesn't stop at places.

The feeling extends to people too — classmates, friends, cousins, teachers, anyone we like. A subtle, unspoken sense of mine. Not always possessive, not always conscious. But present. We feel a small sting when a close friend doesn't take our side in an argument, doesn't join a stroll, doesn't respond the way we'd hoped.

In its mildest form, this is harmless. A little attachment adds texture to everyday life — it gives us a sense of belonging.

But there is a line.

When that quiet sense of ownership hardens into possessiveness, when expectation curdles into entitlement, something shifts. A lost parking spot, a friend's small disappointment — and suddenly the reaction is out of proportion to the cause.

Eastern philosophy has a word for this: maya. In Hindu thought, it names the illusion that the world we perceive — and possess — is fixed and separate from us, when really nothing is truly ours. Everything passes through us as much as we pass through it.

It's worth noting that another Maya — the poet Maya Angelou — spent a lifetime writing about the opposite pull: the deep human need to belong somewhere, to someone. Perhaps both are true at once. We are creatures who need to belong, even while nothing we cling to is permanently ours.

Complete detachment isn't how most of us live. It probably isn't how most of us can live.

So the goal, perhaps, isn't to eliminate attachment, but to notice the moment it begins to take hold.

That noticing might be enough.