Impermanence

I was going to write about something else today, but this Buddhist concept kept coming to me as I wended my way through a day of phone calls and shifting emotions and the persistent feeling that maybe nothing was lasting-- except perhaps this "tire" around my middle, and even that, my trainer says, can be vanished with enough sweat and sit-ups!

Anyway, I'd like to think that this Feeling of having been tried and convicted in secret and then ignominiously exiled would be impermanent, but it is becoming like an unwelcome relative, who arrived unannounced, and simply has not let it be known when s/he would leave! So I talk with the Feeling, because even if I don't, the Feeling hangs out in the corners of my mind or the room or on my shoulder when I'm out walking. But no matter how much I talk to it, I don't come to a better understanding. I am about to think I may never understand, really, and I'll just have to wait until the Feeling has sampled enough of my psyche, and it moves on to become unwelcome company for someone else.

Impermanence is become my hope! Just as impermanence became my lesson: So I thought I was to be continuing to work where I was, do what I did, develop what program I could, serve those who were given to me to serve? Evidently not! But now, after the Fall (as it were), I am still in impermanence... This too shall pass...

So today I took some comfort from that, and fed the birds, and watered the geraniums, and exchanged kindesses with callers and emailers. Impermanent though we may be, in this constant flux, there are residues that last, imprints made, the transcendent confirmed.

Although it may be (and there is ample evidence of it in my life this year!) that we live in a world of constant change, that impermanence IS indeed the nature of things, and so we are to live without too much attachment to things, or even to each other... still, at the end of my everyday I give thanks for those who have not ostracized me nor otherwise viewed me and our relationships as impermanent. And as I rise from what is sometimes these days a rather more fitful sleep than I usually have, I greet the day in hope of what more will come down the pathways of friendships I enjoy...

It is my one, true comfort, every day: knowing that I am not forgotten, that I am not alone, that I am loved. "Now abide faith, hope, and love-- but the greatest of these is [indeed] love." In these, some of my most difficult life-circumstances, I find I am able to reaffirm what transcends impermanence... and feel blessed.

May y'all feel blessed, too!