The Gifts of Impermanence

We are obsessed with permanence. All through our lives we work hard — very hard to achieve permanence in life.

We seek to achieve a certain degree of permanence in our lifestyle. We seek to achieve permanence in our beauty, youth, job,wealth, name and fame and family.

The only area we seek impermanence is with our problems. We want our problems to be impermanent and temporary and our joys be permanent. Permanence of suffering is a painful and powerful motivator which inspires action in most of us.

Our life projects are aimed at ensuring permanence of name and fame, wealth and wellbeing well beyond our working years and sometimes we want it to last even after our death. It is a tempting project to say the least.

Now, for some to many of us our jobs and ventures achieve a reasonable amount of success in terms of material wealth which fools us to believe that we have gained enough control over our future.

We happily neglect the dependencies we are surrounded with. No one cares about the clean water supply or even shortage of potable water by the time you retire or air decent enough to breathe or a pandemic that no one ever predicted or a market crash that can shake the financial stability of most nations. We live in a delusion of control and we fool ourselves to believe that nothing is going to change that is the variables are going to remain constant.

How can we call a society sane, that just refuses to understand the complexity and interdependence of variable factors that life on earth has to offer and instead live in denial of illusory control and fake sense of permanence?

The greater problem is complete ignorance and misunderstanding of our understanding of suffering. We grow up to be adults to understand Newton’s laws of motion but fail to understand basic human laws of emotion.

Have you ever considered that most of our suffering arises from our toxic desire to manifest permanence where there is none. We suffer when we fail to retain the beauty and strength of youth. We suffer and stretch the boundaries of youth and beauty through medicines, surgeries and app filters.

Our failure to understand and accept the basic nature and truth of impermanence is a great source of suffering, but who cares? Adults never understood impermanence and mindlessly tried to control the outcomes and retain permanence of results of and for their kids. And kids grow up to Delusionally mimic the acts of parents not knowing or understandingthe perils of obsession with permanence.

This systemic resistance to reality and obsession with permanence is an act of hypnotism mastered by corporates who run the world. A world desperate to feel “not enough” can be sold products that sell you dreams of permanence.

But have you ever considered any sign of permanence is actually a sign of decay and stagnation. If you were stuck in a job without promotion or if your kids stayed in the same class for years together. Your body is constantly changing, so is nature around you and any thing in nature that stops changing is only when it perishes to be.

Death is permanent. Life on the other hand is impermanent.

Life’s impermanence allows you to grow. It allows you to adapt, survive and thrive. It allows you to reflect and respond and add value to yourself and those around you. Impermanence is an antidote to boredom of stagnation. Impermanence of suffering is hope for a better future. Impermanence of technology is the birthplace of even better technology.

Impermanence is a gift and Buddha saw it 2500 years back. We suffer because we hardly understand the value of acceptance of reality. A reality that is constantly changing demands a permanent attitude of openness and acceptance over resistance and denial.

May we open our eyes and hearts to the gifts of impermanence and may we inspire others to embrace the same.