This Too Shall Pass

The Liberating Freedom of Impermanence

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

The weight and force of my father’s hand swing through the air, a heavy ring magnifying the damage on my nine-year-old cheek. Blood vessels burst across the right half of my face as I tumble into a pile on the hard linoleum of kitchen floor. From this new vantage point my father’s stature and fury are amplified.

Behind my wailing sobs a single comfort sits in the back of my mind.

With a heavy step I feel a blister burst in my boot. It is mile 23 of a road march, and the new pain mixes with the ache in my shoulders from my ruck sack and the exhaustion throughout my body. I look at the men in a line marching before me and dare not fall behind them.

With a grim determination I remind myself.

Unable to get warm, I shiver to the point of cramping, sweat pouring all over my body. Thrashing in an emergency room bed, teeth chattering so hard I am sure they will shatter in my mouth.

Under four blankets I have only one coherent thought.

Confronting Impermanence

When I was in fifth grade, I learned the sun would eventually expand and consume the Earth. This was my first real existential fear. I was taught this would not happen for billions of years. But I lived on Earth and did not want it to be destroyed.

Should anyone survive long enough, they will learn about the fleeting nature of all things, not just people. Whether through gaining knowledge of death or entropy, we learn nothing will remain as is.

This knowledge unlocked fear in me when I acquired it. But as the truth of our nature sat in my mind, I learned that it was to be embraced, not avoided. Because it was something I’d known for a long time, learned from suffering I’d already endured in my brief life.

No matter how angry my father was, that anger would end. He’d tire, or he’d kill me. I knew this in moments drenched in terror. No cruel punishment, no abuse, could last forever. And that fact was a flotation to cling to in a sea of torment.

But my life has not been all about suffering. I have seen good. I have been given good. I have lived in the good.

I know the good will not last any more than the bad. But as I read the doom in my phone, as I momentarily feel myself succumbing to the dread, I remember the truth.

Nothing terrible in this world will last. This too shall pass.

It can seem impossible to make the world a better place. It feels like there is always something, someone, making it worse. But that too is subject to the impermanence of everything.

Even by doing nothing, all that ails the world will end. But what happens when we decide to act?

That boy crying on the floor persisted.

That soldier trudging along kept moving.

That patient endured and healed.

All of them led to the person I am today. Their ills fell to the forces of time and entropy.

Persisting, trudging, healing, these are evolutionary responses to stimuli, wired into us by billions of years of life finding a way to just one more generation. And they are as meaningless and absurd as everything else.

Everything is meaningless and everything is absurd. Even in that void we have some small agency. Give in to the cruelty of existence, or push back and make other’s existence suck just a little less. It’s all going to end in stillness, but we don’t have to allow the worst to persist while we exist.

It’s absurd to make effort to make the world better. Be absurd in the face of absurdity. Suffer and pay it forward with kindness. Why not? Nothing matters, true. All marks we make are written in pencil. But we, for a little while, we get to hold that pencil. Write something better than what’s around you.

Or don’t. I’m not your boss. But I want this absurd world to suck a little less, so in the face of absurdity I’m still scrawling in pencil.

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