Finding Refuge in Transience and Uncertainty
No person ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same person.
— HERACLITUS
In 2017,1 taught a mindfulness and emotional-intelligence leadership training for employees from an organization in Sonoma County. They were in the midst of dealing with a lot of posttraumatic distress. What were then the worst fires in Northern California history had recently devastated their county, killing many residents, incinerating over six thousand homes, and leaving thousands homeless.
During the program, Jane, who lived in Sonoma, told a particularly moving story. She had been evacuated when the fires quickly approached her neighborhood and had only minutes to gather any precious belongings. Many days later, when Jane was allowed to go back to her home, she discovered that her whole neighborhood had been lost. As she walked up to her house, there was not a single thing left. It had been razed to the ground. However, she noticed a rock engraved with the word Faith still lying where the front door had once been. She picked up the charred rock, a gift from a friend, and the metaphor of that word inspired her to begin to put the pieces of her devastated life back together.
No one would doubt the universal principle of change. The rupture in Jane’s life is but one small example of how it manifests. It is a key teaching common to philosophy, science, and spirituality. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus pointed this out twenty-five hundred years ago: “Nothing endures but change.” Indeed, transience is the only constant, and uncertainty the only certainty. Given that, how do we find peace in this changing world? What can we rely on given the flux and flow of every living thing and every experience we love and hold dear? This is the dilemma we face. Nothing endures, but we still feel an urge to hold on to and control our experience so it doesn’t change or leave. My friend, who lost his wife to cancer, described this paradox beautifully. Not long after her death, he said: “I have completely let her go, and I totally want her back.”
Though most people acknowledge and accept the reality of impermanence, it takes a wise person to live in alignment with this law. Most of the time, we resist it or ignore it. Despite all evidence to the contrary, we easily fall into the trap of expecting things to continue the way they are or have been, only to be caught off guard or annoyed when life upends that assumption.
Even though I know deeply how things change, I still forget this in simple ways all the time. For example, I can get annoyed when a scratch appears on my new car, or I can be surprised when the beautiful orchids I cherish begin their inevitable deterioration after their long months of bold bloom. I may feel shock when a favorite old shirt suddenly develops a hole, or feel resistance when a beloved friend moves to a different city, as if I’d assumed they would stay nearby forever.
That everyone gets taken aback by change in small ways is almost as enduring a truth as change itself. But our resistance to the bigger changes in life is what becomes more problematic. Do you resent signs of aging, like graying hair and lines etched more deeply around your eyes? Do you resist slowing down to accommodate your older, less supple body? Do you protest when your perfectly healthy body gets sick or you receive an unexpected medical diagnosis? Do the ups and downs of the stock market and economic uncertainty fill you with anxiety and resentment? The ways we resist change are innumerable, even though we know it is hopeless and even painful to do so.
These are natural responses to our human predicament, to vulnerability. We live in a changing world and an unreliable body; we live with uncertain relationships, a fluctuating economy, shifting social norms, and rapidly advancing technology. We never know when disaster will strike, whether that’s a life-threatening diagnosis to a loved one, a forest fire that rips through our house, or a sudden economic crash that guts our retirement savings. No wonder we are anxious and restless. No wonder the brain, in an attempt to survive this turmoil, developed a negativity bias, which is always scanning for perceived threats. Where do we find peace and ease amidst these ever-shifting realities?
Susan, an independent-living specialist, teaches an “adjustment to vision loss” course to individuals and groups. A significant part of the class is teaching mindfulness meditation. Losing vision is an extremely difficult, fearful experience that affects all aspects of a person’s life. Visually impaired individuals can lose friends, who feel uncomfortable around them; lose jobs that they no longer can accomplish; and even lose their normal place in their families. The resulting stress can cause isolation and physical and emotional problems.
As a way of working with these challenges, Susan introduces patients to meditation. Early on, she noticed how this practice helps people reduce their stress. It helps her patients think more clearly and make better decisions. It assists them to communicate better about their many losses. From there, people can start the process of regaining a healthy sense of themselves in order to self-advocate, retrain for new careers, and regain their general health.
Simply put, mindfulness helps them develop the clarity to meet their changing circumstances, which necessitate adaptability. Shining a spotlight on the changing nature of experience is what allows all of us to know it in our bones, so it informs everything we do. Such insight shapes and crafts our being. We then flow better with the shifting rhythm of life, like Susan’s patients; we are responsive rather than resistant.
This requires a careful and sustained inquiry into our lived experience of transience. We need to know this reality intimately. When meditating, it means being aware of how every moment is a changing landscape of phenomena. Sounds ceaselessly come and go. Physical sensations are forever pulsing, vibrating, tingling, shifting, and moving — tensing and relaxing, expanding and contracting. Thoughts flicker like static, constantly generating flurries of ideas. Mental images create movies of visual landscapes. The breath is a restless wave moving through our torso. Emotions ebb and flow like tides or storms. Moods forever arise and pass.
Nothing is static in our inner world, which is a dance of ephemeral experience. The closer we attend to this reality, the more we see that no thing stays around for very long. The deeper we penetrate this truth, the more it allows us to not hold on so tightly. We see how experience is like water evaporating into thin air. It’s impossible to hold. We learn to release the controlling grip we so often have around our experience, body, friends, work, money, and life. Holding them so tightly, we often squeeze the space or the light out of them. Instead, we can learn to appreciate what we have and not take it for granted.
In time, we learn to savor life’s transient preciousness and to let go when that is asked of us. Rather than considering impermanence to be a depressing reflection, we can instead think of it as an urgent call to wake up, to be present and taste the exquisiteness of this fleeting moment. When we really get how brief and uncertain life is, then we stop taking things for granted and pay rapt attention to the beauty and richness of life all around us.
“One less” is a mantra that I developed for myself in relation to this theme of change. Whatever I am doing — whether breathing, watching the full moon rise, the setting sun, spending time with a beloved friend, or visiting with my parents in England — I reflect that it is one less time that I will get to do it in this life. Each breath taken is one less inhale and exhale. Each lunar cycle is one less to witness. Each summer is one less time to feel the warmth of the sun on my skin. Each time with beloved friends and family is one less time to savor their company, and so on. When I do this, I feel the urgency to really take in each moment. To not get complacent thinking I will have a thousand more just like it. Because the truth is, we never know how long we will get to experience this fleeting and beautiful world.
• PRACTICE •
This meditation can be done anywhere, but it is meant to take place where there is a lot of activity and stimulation — the more the better. Seek out a bench in a city park or train station. Sit in a chair in a busy café or restaurant.
To begin, sit comfortably and lower your gaze; if it is comfortable and safe to do so, you might close your eyes. Become aware of the totality of your experience. Start with being aware of sounds. Listen to all the changing noises, both loud and quiet, distant and near. Attend to people, machines, traffic, birds, and conversations. Notice the constantly changing auditory landscape.
Next, without losing awareness of sounds, become present to all the changing physical sensory impressions in your body. Notice the ever-shifting variety of touch and physical sensation: pressure, movement, tingling, vibration, ceaselessly ebbing and flowing. Feel the breath, that continual reminder of change, which never stays the same for more than a moment.
Next, become aware of all the visual impressions of light, form, color, and texture. If your eyes are shut, notice the subtle dance of light behind the eyelids. If they are open, be aware of the dizzying array of movements, shapes, and colors. Also notice the transitory quality of smells and tastes, so that eventually you become aware of all five senses forever in motion.
Now shift your attention to the domain of your heart and mind. Be aware as emotions come, perhaps triggered by overheard conversations, smells, or memories. Be present to the fleeting nature of your emotions as they pulse like waves in the body. Similarly, notice the rapidly changing canvas of the mind. See how quickly and incessantly thoughts, images, ideas, views, memories, and plans come and go, flickering like a never-ending stroboscope.
Stay present, noticing how nothing stays the same for more than a few moments before something else pulls your attention. For ten to twenty minutes, abide in this clear awareness, remaining still in the center of this hurricane of activity. Notice what happens as you open to the ever-changing nature of life.
If your eyes are closed, open them slowly. See how the inner experience of change is mirrored externally. Nothing stays the same for very long, and even what appears solid and enduring, like a building or a tree, is always changing. Our perception shifts with the time of day, the light, the wind, the people passing, and the birds alighting. Experience varies moment by moment. All things are in flux.
As you emerge from this meditation, see if you can maintain awareness of the transient nature of experience. See if this allows you to relate to things in life differently, with less holding on or resistance. When we fully understand in our bones that everything changes, it allows us to appreciate the pleasures of life, to hold them lightly, knowing they will pass. Similarly, it supports our becoming less reactive to pain, since we know that every experience, no matter how bad, will shift. In this way, we find peace amidst this restless sea of change.
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