Impermanence
When my first child was 6 months old I remember walking in our neighborhood with him on my chest on a late August afternoon. The low sun spilled a golden glow onto everything it touched. In Durham, North Carolina we were experiencing a respite from the unbearable heat. With the shift in temperature, I sensed a changing - of the seasons and of my baby. With that recognition, came a gripping anxiety and desperate attempt to hold onto summer and to the fleeting moments of my child’s infancy. My baby was growing up and there was nothing I could do to stop it. No amount of the efforting or perfecting or mental scrapbooking that I would try over the next couple of years would allow me to escape the unavoidable loss bestowed onto us all.
On the surface, I was experiencing the bittersweet growing up of my child, but on a deeper level I knew that the turning of 12 weeks to six months and soon to be a year represented something much more profound. The turning of winter, to spring, to summer, to fall had never paralleled my own experience so closely. I felt within my nervous system the knowledge that everything changes and that the people and circumstances I hold dear will change, too.
For 30 year old me, I was unknowingly facing the dread that many of us do at one point in our lives or another: that there will come a day when there is seemingly no more. On the surface I was a mother with a healthy growing baby. But under that was the truth of our mortality. That with our death, comes our end. That was my story. Teachers like Byron Katie implore us to ask, “But is it true?” It became important for me to ask: “Is impermanence a matter of a final ending or rather of a continual changing?”
After much suffering and developing skills in mindfulness, I eventually developed the skill of savoring and holding experiences lightly. Experiencing the joy of the moments in my body and soul and allowing them to leave when they would. Experiencing painful experiences and knowing they wouldn’t last either. I knew that each moment would leave and make room for a new one. Weirdly enough, there can be a kind of predictability and comfort in knowing that life isn’t certain or stationary. We can eventually learn to rest in the nature of change.
What gave me the trust to do this though, the letting go? Well, for starters, l learned that gripping onto experiences or people simply doesn’t work. It only amplified the pain of them leaving and created a living hell for me. Mindfulness taught me that everything changes and that I can observe these changes from the seat of a witness. I also developed the skill of self compassion, saying things like, “Of course you want this to stay, this is important to to you.”. And while I’ve grown so much, this fear does still sneak up on me from time to time.
Nature provides us with a clear picture of this changing but not ending. A seed grows into a flower. The flower dries and stops producing. It drops its seeds. The flower decays and enriches the surrounding soil to create nutrients for the seed to grow. The seed grows into a new flower. Did the flower cease to be or did it change form? Looking at clouds: A cloud turns to rain. The rain flows into rivers and the ocean. Animals drink the water and eliminate it. The earth takes it back and then the sky, evaporating back and becoming a cloud. A kind of naturalist’s resurrection.
In his last sermon that is titled, All Good Things Do Not Come to an End, my grandfather, Bob McClernon, wrote the following:
“Once upon a time, when I was young, I knew a secret holy place in the deepest woods, the heart of the forest still unprofaned. It was a sanctuary for a reality in which fairies danced when the moon was full, birds and rabbits spoke, and a great stillness created a palpable oneness and covered it all with a mantle of peace. There were towering oaks and friendly sassafras and fern and mayapple and other plants of various kinds. For ages of autumns, the trees had dropped their leaves and flowers and other plants ceased their growing and died. Even though I was young, I felt a touch of melancholy of the mortality of living things - but more than melancholy, infinitely more. For I saw, as I believe little children do, that the good fruit of a spring rain and summer sun did not, and would not, utterly cease to be. That good lives on in a soil enriched continually by the dying, but not the total death, of everything that had been.”
Everything changing became a fact of life for me and provided me with a framework of how to relate to my experiences. I knew that holding onto experiences caused suffering as did resisting them. This knowledge wasn’t enough though. I had a felt sense of a timelessness that was impervious to the passing experiences of the temporal world. Jack Kornfield says that “along with our physical birth is the mysterious quality of consciousness not yet understood by modern science but is most directly defined as the knowing capacity. Consciousness is the clear, pure, transparent, lucid quality that knows touch, thoughts, and feelings. But it's more like a mirror that reflects all things, knowing experience but not limited by them.” To get to know this spaciousness, you may notice what has stayed unchanged in you throughout your life. Your age has changed, your appearance has changed, your health status changed, other circumstances have changed and yet, throughout your life, there has been a thread through each experience and through each year that has stayed the same. This is why you might hear someone in their 80s say they feel like a child inside.
We can count on change and we can find stability in the truth of instability. And when necessary, we can deeply grieve the utter heartbreak that comes along with this changing human life. Pema Chödrön says that “only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.” My minister, Dorisanne Cooper, once described this process of one truth giving way to an even larger one as an opening door. Yes, there is change, and on the other side of that opening door is a second truth. A quiet and mysterious one.
Getting to know this place of the unchanged, the witness, the hub of a wheel of changing experiences, is a freedom that is not conditioned by any state.
I look at my child now. He is almost 7. He is tall and wise and loves baseball. He has changed. I can only recall certain details of what he was like as a baby unless I look at photos. And yet - he is the same. We are the same. The passing of bonding with my baby has made room for bonding with my big boy - for biking, swimming, and dancing.
Today, the September sun is golden and casting a low glow over this first day of Autumn. Its setting is making way for a new day, for a new season. The leaves are turning color. They will soon fall and the trees will appear barren. The deciduous trees will look as if their end has come. But under the leaf litter is an opening door. A mysterious and paradoxical world of roots and microorganisms that hold it all together through the changing seasons.
