Impermanence
It takes courage to be a human alive on planet earth. Everything we grow to love and rely on is always changing, and we can’t hang on to any of it forever, no matter how desperately we try. One reason I’m drawn to Buddhist philosophy is that it addresses the issue of impermanence head-on, explaining how much of our suffering comes from clinging to what we desire while rejecting the truth of life as it actually is.
In her book, Living Beautifully: With Uncertainty and Change, one of my favorite Buddhist teachers, Pema Chödrön, writes, “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”
Pema says that people have no respect for impermanence. “We take no delight in it; in fact, we despair of it. We regard it as pain. We try to resist it by making things that will last forever. Somehow, in the process of trying to deny that things are always changing, we lose our sense of the sacredness of life. We tend to forget we are part of the natural scheme of things.”
Pema reminds us that life is very brief, its length unpredictable. She writes, “Nothing is static or fixed. That all is fleeting and impermanent is the ordinary state of affairs. Everything is in process. Everything—every tree, every blade of grass, all the animals, insects, human beings, buildings, the animate and the inanimate—is always changing, moment to moment. It means that life isn’t always going to go our way. It means that there is loss as well as gain. And we don’t like that.”
“What a predicament!” Pema points out. “We seem doomed to suffer simply because we have a deep-seated fear of how things really are. Our attempts to find lasting pleasure, lasting security, are at odds with the fact that we’re part of a dynamic system in which everything and everyone is in process.”
Her advice: “We can get used to the fleeting quality of life in a natural, gentle, even joyful way, by watching the seasons change, watching day turning to night, watching children grow up, watching sandcastles dissolve back into the sea. But if we don’t find some way to make friends with groundlessness and the ever-changing energy of life, then we’ll always be struggling to find stability in a shifting world.”
Take a Moment Micro-Meditation
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