Life: The Endlessly Passing Show

I used to have a beautiful hand painted-sign that read: This too shall pass away. It meant the difficult times I was going through wouldn’t last, which I found hard to believe as I stood in the eye of my personal storm. Eventually, though, the storm did pass, and I moved on with my life. That was my first lesson in the Buddhist concept of impermanence, though I was far from grasping the idea at the time.

It is almost 40 years later. The sign is long gone, but its wisdom remains. Here’s what I have learned: Things change. Life is dynamic, like a river. It just keeps flowing, taking with it experiences we are glad to be rid of and those we had hoped to keep. Nothing is more dramatic proof of that than the recession that is not quite over.

People who were busy living their lives—going to work, enjoying their homes, buying things, watching their kids play soccer—suddenly felt as if they had been hit by a tsunami. Businesses, jobs, homes, income, security, gone—not only here in the U.S., but worldwide. That’s impermanence with a capital I.

A recession, a hurricane, a flood, death or divorce, bankruptcy, and illness are all pretty dramatic ways to learn that things change when we least expect them to. On the flip side, they can change in wonderful ways: a wedding, a new baby, a windfall, a best seller. These are the changes we welcome.

In 1970, a guy named Richard Alpert, who became Ram Dass, wrote a book called Be Here Now. He was trying to tell westerners what Eastern religions have been teaching for centuries: Enjoy now because now is all we have. He was right, of course. Joseph Goldstein, one of the earliest teachers of mindfulness meditation in this country and the author of One Dharma, was more poetic when he wrote: “All experience is part of an endlessly passing show.”

Now, that is a thought to meditate on.