The Gift of Impermanence

The aim is to acknowledge the feeling, acknowledge the loss, and use it to become more present, more awake to our lives as they are, full of both losses and 

gains, full of both sorrows and 

joys. 

The navy blue fabric of my favorite nightgown is growing thin. I’ve looked online, and the brand no longer makes this particular style, which I have loved well. Hanging it back on the hook in my closet in the mornings, noticing its wear, I lament that things don’t last. 

It’s a similar lament I feel, though more intense, when I have a FaceTime with my six-year-old niece in Alabama and notice how much she’s grown and changed since I last saw her in person in early March, just before the pandemic settled down on us with its dark and heavy wings. She’ll be so much more grown when it’s finally safe to see her again, and I’ll have missed precious stages of her development. It feels like it will be only a moment from now when she’s too grown up to want to have story time with me or crawl together into her secret fort in the back of her closet. 

And it’s a similar lament I feel, of course, when I think about the time I’m missing with my parents, not getting to visit them over the holidays, not getting to share precious moments together during their golden years. 

The weight of loss and grief—even just the burden of change—feels unendurable sometimes. We lament what leaves us, grieve preemptively for what we watch in decline. Impermanence feels unbearable.  

Yet aren’t we all looking forward to an end to the pandemic? Don’t we all look forward with great anticipation to the end of our least favorite season? Aren’t we all relieved when the time-consuming project at work is finally completed, thrilled when the neighbor breaks up with her obnoxious boyfriend whose late-night drunken rowdiness disturbed our sleep, and giddy when the poison ivy rash finally clears up? 

We cherish impermanence as much as we loathe it. We dread a lessening of our joy, but perpetually hope our suffering and sorrow might diminish. It helps me to recognize this both/and story of impermanence. There are things we dread losing, and things we can’t wait to let go of. Impermanence isn’t wholly bad; it’s often a thing we’re quite grateful for, though we don’t often pause to recognize that. 

And in fact, impermanence is neither good nor bad, it simply is. It is the water we swim in, a foundational fact of our human existence. The more we can accept this, the more we can learn to honor impermanence and not fight against it, the more ease we will feel in our lives. 

Of course we will feel loss when we experience impermanence through the loss of a loved one or the loss of a routine or pleasure we counted on to bring us joy. The aim isn’t to avoid feeling. The aim is to acknowledge the feeling, acknowledge the loss, and use it to become more present, more awake to our lives as they are, full of both losses and gains, full of both sorrows and joys. 

(By the way, Thich Nhat Hanh writes about this much more eloquently in his book The Art of Living, which I highly recommend.)