chocolate comes, chocolate goes
Impermanence is the fragrance of my life just as it is. This notion brings a subtle joy to these old bones and bare scalp.
A New Yorker magazine cartoon depicts a couple strolling down the street, one saying to the other:
These are the ‘good old days’ that someday we won’t be able to remember.
I think a lot about when the kids were little, and how great it felt to be a new dad, and now that both kids are adults, and living in an empty nest… Well, I feel sad sometimes.
Like the cartoon, I know there are so many memories that aren’t easily accessible anymore. That “someday we won’t be able to remember” is here. I guess memory itself is impermanent, uncertain, imperfect, fading.
At least mine feels this way.
One of the Buddha’s most significant teachings is to really examine our life and our world as impermanent and changing all the time, disappearing even as it arises.
There is a chant in the Pali language I used to chant daily as a young monk in a monastery in Sri Lanka (before kids):
Anicca vata sankhara/ Upada vaya dhammino/ Upakituva nirujihanti/ Tesang vupasamo sukho
One translation would be:
All conditioned things are impermanent/ Their nature is to arise and pass away/ To live in harmony with this truth/ Brings the highest happiness.
How do we live in harmony with the way things actually are when I can’t even remember what I had for breakfast yesterday?
But I can appreciate the point here. The chant suggests our discontent comes from wanting things to differ from how they are. Like trying to push a river in a different direction with our bare hands.
Take my hair, for example (yes, please take my hair!) As many of us get older, the hair thing comes up (or off in my case).
what happened to my hair?
When I look in the mirror, it’s like I am seeing a photoshopped version of myself. What happened to my hair? Sure, there’s not much left, but I catch myself quarreling with nature herself that what little she left me with is all white.
Our son came home for the summer yesterday after finishing his 2nd year in college. It is truly magnificent to see him again. And I really can’t wait for him, as my dedicated hair trimmer, to cut off this sparse outgrowth of white partially covering my scalp.
how to live in light of impermanence?
The question I turn over a lot in my mind is how do I live as I let the Buddha’s teaching on impermanence soak into my rickety bones?
That Pali chants suggest the answer rather obliquely: To live in harmony with the reality of impermanence brings great happiness.
How do I live with what little time I have left that feels in consonance with the way things are?
Shortly before he died, William Butler Yeats wrote:
If I had to put it in a single phrase, I would say that one can live the truth, but one can really not know the truth, and I must express the truth with the rest of my life
This helps immensely. It takes the burden off trying to get a deeper insight into impermanence through my practice of insight meditation.
I got it enough already. I just need to be mindful of not wasting time, and expressing the truth of impermanence with the time I have left.
I love how the Austrian poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke expresses this:
The knowledge of impermanence
that haunts our days
is their very fragrance.
The fragrance of impermanence IS the fragrance of my life just as it is. This brings a subtle joy to these old bones and bare scalp.
And the fragrance of impermanence is sweet.
I think the late, great Tibetan Lama Yeshe should have the last word here:
Chocolate comes
Chocolate goes
Chocolate disappears
All such transient pleasures are like this.
But take heart!
There is another kind of happiness available to you,
a deep abiding joy that comes from your own mind.
This kind of happiness is always with you, always available.
Whenever you need it, it is always here.
This is why I keep meditating. This joy just gets deeper and more meaningful every day.
