The Clarity Of Impermanence

I hadn’t seen Steve in quite a while. We grew up in the same neighborhood, a bunch of us kids enamored with hockey and The Three Stooges. We all knew him as Zig, a nickname my older brother had endowed upon him. I never asked why. Life eventually took all of us in different directions until the unexpected reunion of us neighborhood kids at Steve’s wake.

Losing a friend hits differently. I’ve lost both of my parents, and as painful as their passings were and at times continue to be, I’ve come to accept the inevitable progression of children eventually burying their parents. But there is no natural expected progression when losing someone your own age.

Seeing Steve for the last time brought back a plethora of happy memories of my childhood. I could see all of us again as we once were. 

And now one of us was no longer here. 

There was a sense of randomness about his passing. As if it could have been any one of us who was no longer here. It was in that randomness I felt the uncomfortable presence of impermanence, of life reminding me again of its finite and often unpredictable nature. 

While impermanence will remind us of our own mortality, it also provides us with an opportunity as to how we decide to embrace it. We can choose to know it on an intellectual level, acknowledging that our time here is limited. Or we can let impermanence be the filter we use to reassess how we actually spend the limited time we do have here. 

Embracing impermanence reshapes our priorities. Who really matters? What really matters? What really needs to get done? What really needs to be said? Four powerful questions with clarity and urgency contained within each answer.

When we understand we’re running out of time to waste we tend not to waste it. 

Rest easy, Zig.

Photo by Rampal Singh on Unsplash