Impermanence: The Art of Appreciating What Is
We spend so much of our lives trying to create stability.
We build careers, purchase homes, establish routines, form relationships, and create lives that offer us a sense of security.
Some people spend twenty years working for the same company. They become comfortable in their positions, confident in the lives they’ve built, and certain about what tomorrow will look like.
But what happens when tomorrow looks nothing like today?
What happens when the company closes its doors? When a relationship ends? When the home we thought we’d grow old in is no longer ours?
What happens when life changes without asking our permission?
The truth is, nothing in life is permanent.
And while that realization can be frightening, I don’t believe impermanence is something we should spend our lives fearing.
I believe it’s something we can learn to appreciate.
We often associate change with loss, forgetting that change is also responsible for so much of what we’ve come to love.
Think about the relationships we cherish, the opportunities we’ve embraced, or even the people we’ve become. None of those things would exist in quite the same way if life had remained exactly as it was.
Yet we spend so much time resisting the very thing that makes growth possible.
We become attached to how things are, believing that if we can hold everything together, we can somehow protect ourselves from uncertainty.
But stability is not permanence.
And control is not certainty.
We can make plans, prepare for the future, and build lives that feel secure. There’s nothing wrong with wanting those things. But somewhere along the way, we can begin treating the lives we’ve built as promises that nothing will change.
And life has never made us that promise.
This doesn’t mean we should stop planning or pursuing our dreams.
It means we can learn to appreciate what exists right now without demanding that it remain unchanged.
We can love our homes, knowing we may not live in them forever. We can take pride in our careers without allowing them to define our entire identity.
And we can love people deeply while recognizing that relationships, like everything else, evolve.
Even the person we are today is temporary.
I find that thought especially interesting. We work so hard to figure out who we are, only to discover that we’re constantly becoming someone else.
I’ve come to recognize that some of the chapters I once desperately wanted to hold on to were the very chapters I eventually needed to leave.
Not because they were mistakes.
Not because they lacked meaning.
But because they had served their purpose in my life.
Something doesn’t have to last forever to have been meaningful.
I think about nature and how effortlessly it demonstrates this truth.
Trees don’t resist the changing seasons. They lose their leaves, stand bare through winter, and eventually begin again.
Flowers bloom without any guarantee of how long their petals will last.
And rivers continue flowing, never holding on to the water that has already passed through them.
I wonder why we expect something different from ourselves.
Why do we believe that holding on to something will somehow preserve what it means to us?
Maybe part of appreciating life is recognizing that we were never meant to keep every part of it.
Get Rachelle Cummings’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Of course, that’s easier to understand when we’re talking about falling leaves than when we’re facing the possibility of losing something we love.
Knowing that everything changes doesn’t mean we won’t grieve. It doesn’t mean endings won’t hurt or that uncertainty will suddenly become comfortable.
We can accept that something is temporary and still wish we had more time with it.
I think there’s room for both feelings.
And there’s another side to impermanence that we often overlook.
Our difficulties are temporary, too.
The uncertainty, the grief, the disappointment, the uncomfortable space between who we were and who we’re becoming.
When we’re in the middle of something painful, it’s difficult to imagine feeling any differently. Our present circumstances can become so consuming that we forget how much our lives have already changed.
But just as we cannot guarantee that the things we love will remain, we also cannot assume that our struggles will last forever.
Sometimes life changes for the worse.
Sometimes it changes for the better.
And sometimes what initially feels like the end of something becomes the beginning of something we couldn’t have imagined.
We don’t always have the knowledge to understand what’s happening while we’re experiencing it.
We make decisions based on what we know at the time. Later, we may learn something that changes our perspective entirely.
We grow, reconsider things we once believed, and occasionally discover that what we wanted five years ago is no longer what we want today.
Isn’t that interesting?
We spend so much time trying to figure out what our lives should look like, without knowing how differently we might see the world tomorrow.
I’ve reached a point where I no longer believe I need to have everything figured out to appreciate my life.
I don’t need to know exactly what tomorrow holds, and I don’t need everyone to understand the decisions I’m making today.
But something I’ve been thinking about lately is how easy it can be to become so excited about what’s next that we overlook what’s happening now.
We can spend years looking forward to a different life, only to realize that the life we were so eager to move beyond contained moments we would someday miss.
And I don’t want to rush through this chapter simply because I’m excited about the next one.
Because this chapter is my life, too.
The ordinary mornings.
The conversations.
The quiet moments.
The people I love.
The things I’ve worked hard to create.
Even the uncertainty.
All of it belongs to this moment in my life, whether it stays the same or not.
Impermanence isn’t a reason to stop caring about the future. It’s a reminder that the present deserves our attention, too.
We can continue building, dreaming, loving, and making plans while recognizing that none of it comes with a guarantee.
And maybe that’s what makes appreciation so important.
Not knowing how long something will last doesn’t make it any less valuable.
If anything, it gives us another reason to pay attention while it’s here.
One day, these moments will become memories.
And I don’t want to look back and realize I was so focused on what was coming next that I forgot to appreciate what was already here.
