The Buddha taught that everything is impermanent – flowers, tables, mountains, political regimes, bodies, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness.
We cannot find anything that is permanent.
Impermanence is more than an idea.
It is a practice to help us touch reality.
Thich Nhat Hahn, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching
Much misery arises from the fantasy that things might be otherwise.
Half the anxiety of having “too much to do” stems from not seeing that there will always be too much to do – so you can stop struggling to get on top of it all. And as the writer Sam Harris notes, we make various everyday problems worse with our implicit indignation that we must deal with them at all – as if we imagined we might one day get to live a problem-free life.
Christian Bobin, a French poet, describes an epiphany: “I was peeling a red apple from the garden when I suddenly understood that life would only ever give me a series of wonderfully insoluble problems. With that thought, an ocean of profound peace entered my heart.”
There’s much that people shouldn’t have to cope with, and that we should fight. But coping per se? That’s just life.
Oliver Burkeman, Too many problems? Maybe coping isn’t the answer
Throughout my whole life, during every minute of it
the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before my eyes
until it has come to surround me,
entirely lit up from within
Teilhard de Chardin
You don’t want to hear the story of my life, and anyway
I don’t want to tell it, I want to listen
to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.
And anyway it’s the same old story –
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.
Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean, for a simple reason.
And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.
Mary Oliver, Dogfish
In recent weeks we have seen words used to bully, distort the truth or make bombastic claims. The desert father placed an emphasis on brevity of speech, as they knew what damage words can do. Here is an ancient Irish prayer – appropriate for Good Friday – to help us develop greater stillness.
A Íosa, Mhic Dé, a bhí ciúin os comhair Phioláit, ná lig dúinn ár dteanga a luascadh gan smaoineadh ar cad tá againn le rá agus conas é a rá.
O Jesus, Son of God, who was silent before Pilate,
don’t let our tongues move
without thinking about what we have to say and how to say it.
New life is sometimes related to shedding of the old self. Struggles can strip away the surface layers of our lives. Growth often requires releasing old identities or expectations. Hardship can be alchemical.
Without the bitterest cold
that penetrates to the very bone,
how can plum blossoms spill forth their fragrance all over the world?
Dōgen Zenji, 1200 -1250
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