Letting Go of Forever
In no time is the ephemeral nature of the world more salient than during the shoulder seasons. I write this now at the beginning of spring. Here, the silent, stark being of winter melts towards the abundance and upbringing of spring in an explosion of budding leaves, birdsong, and rushing rivers. It serves as a vivid, yearly reminder, that nothing stays unchanged. Although its drama is most apparent in spring and fall, transience is always at work beneath the surface of our lives, quietly weaving past into present and present into future.
The observation that the universe is ever changing is ancient wisdom. It has roots stretching back at least as far as the 6th century BCE, invoked by thinkers East and West alike. In Western philosophy, it can be found in the words of Heraclitus: all is flux, all is becoming. In the East, the Buddha’s teaching of anicca (impermanence) similarly holds that all compounded phenomena rise and fall. Over centuries, philosophers, mystics, and poets – disparate in style, context, and culture – converged on a single observation: the world is not static. It was not until relatively recently that science was able to affirm this. From metabolic processes at the cellular level to planetary dynamics on a cosmic scale, the universe is in constant flux. It all unfolds from perpetual change.
Yet to say that all things change is not just to note that we experience impermanence. It is to recognize that life itself is change. While the former is an observation of our perception, the latter underscores a deeper truth about being. Without change, there would be no flow of energy, no cellular growth, no ecological systems. A universe in stasis may be a universe of pristine tranquility but it would be a universe devoid of life. Change is not just a characteristic of the universe we observe and experience, it is the very groundwork of existence for all living beings.
An Unwinnable Fight
It is precisely because we are woven into this tapestry of transience that our longing for permanence can feel so fraught. There is a natural human impulse to want to hold fast: to preserve the fleeting moment, to cling to youth, to keep things as they are when we find them pleasing or comfortable. We see this longing in our myths about immortals, in ancient quests for the elixir of eternal life, and in modern dreams of uploading our consciousness into the digital cloud. Yet to pursue forever is to chase something antithetical to who you fundamentally are. The attempt to carve out a fixed and unchanging self is at odds with the fact that no such self can exist.
How we experience the world (as transitory events streaming by) is intimately bound up with how the world actually is (a shifting flow of interdependent causes and conditions). Put simply, being and becoming are not two separate notions. There is no static substratum lying behind the flux. The flux is reality.
Transience can evoke a sense of loss; a nausea that nothing we love endures. But paradoxically, it is also the source of life in all its richness and renewal. Without the birth–death cycle at the cellular level, we would have never become greater than a couple of zygotes. Without the changing of seasons, the world would remain barren, unable to sustain the biodiversity that breathes life into forests and fields. This is not to romanticize change, for it can be painful: we lose friends, families dissolve, bodies age. But an attempt to escape transience is to deny what constitutes us as living creatures.
Inescapable Conclusion
It is worth remembering that to chase immortality, whether by conquering disease, suspending aging, or controlling every contingency, is not only futile but also, in a deeper sense, an act of self-negation. We are ephemeral precisely because we are alive; we are alive precisely because we are ephemeral. While the natural urge might be to run from this truth, perhaps a more harmonious path is to embrace it —to let that understanding permeate each action of every fleeting moment.
Our day-to-day lives, then, become opportunities to notice how change both humbles and invigorates us. Impermanence need not be a dreary condemnation to oblivion but an ever-present invitation to see ourselves as part of a great, ongoing dance—a dance in which each step appears just long enough to meet the next, and where the vitality of life surges forth not in spite of change, but because of it.
It may be that the surest escape from “forever” is found not by transcending impermanence, but by cherishing it—accepting it as the fuel that moves the world and moves us. The seasons will change and so will we. In many ways, the change is the most profound reminder that we truly are alive.