Impermanence: The Teaching That Changes Everything

The first of the three marks of existence in Buddhist teaching is anicca — impermanence. Everything that arises passes away. Every experience, every emotion, every relationship, every self-concept you’ve ever held: all of it is in motion, changing, none of it fixed.

This teaching can land as a kind of cosmic bad news. If everything passes, nothing can be held onto. Everything you love will be lost.

But there’s another way to hold it — one that takes more practice to find, but is more useful.

The other side of impermanence

If difficult things pass away, that is also true of difficult things. The panic attack ends. The grief softens, eventually. The terrible Tuesday becomes Wednesday. The phase your child is going through — the one that feels endless — is a phase.

“This too shall pass” is one of the most cross-cultural pieces of wisdom in human history, appearing in Persian poetry, Hebrew tradition, Western folk saying. Everyone kept arriving at it independently because it keeps being true.

Impermanence is not partial. It applies equally to joy and sorrow. Which means, if you understand it fully: no situation is forever, no matter how permanent it currently feels.

How meditation reveals this

One of the less-discussed benefits of sitting practice is that it gives you a controlled environment in which to experience impermanence directly. You watch a thought arise, persist briefly, and dissolve. You watch an emotion build, peak, and subside. You watch the sensation in your back change from tolerable to uncomfortable and back again.

Nobody tells you this is happening. You see it. And what you’ve seen changes your relationship to difficult experiences outside of meditation.

This will pass stops being a platitude and becomes something you know from experience.

The peace that comes from letting go

The suffering of attachment is not that we love things. It’s that we love things and demand they be permanent, which they never are. The practice of holding things lightly — enjoying them while they last, releasing them when they go — is not resignation or detachment.

It is, counterintuitively, a way of being more fully present with what is here now, because you’ve stopped arguing with the fact that it won’t be here forever.

Everything passes. Be here while it does.