Blurry Eyes and Sunflowers; or, Impermanence
“It’s not impermanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not.”
- Thich Nhat Hanh
Impermanence is a fancy way of saying that all things change and nothing stays the same. Nothing. Not you, not me, not everyone you love.
Notice your reaction to that. You might have an immediate aversion to the idea, or maybe you do what I did when I first heard about impermanence and nonattachment in yoga teacher training all these years ago—nod and smile because you are totally on board with the concept, but when pressed you angrily ask What do you mean I actually have to lose people I love?!?
I’ve been reflecting on how our reaction to change and our ability to accept it or not is often directly tied to what the change is, and whether we deem it positive, negative, or neutral.
I recently went to the eye doctor for a check-up. Not to brag, but after the eye test he told me I still have 20/20 vision. I recognize this is almost entirely genetic luck, but I’m on a mission. Call me competitive or vain or delusional, but I am determined to avoid wearing reading glasses until I hit 50 next year.
But then I was trying to put on a necklace and when I looked down to fasten it, I couldn’t see the clasp. It made me mad, these blurry eyes trying to stand between me and my admittedly arbitrary goal of being glasses-free until age 50. I usually see changes in my body as a sort of science experiment, a curiosity, but this one bugged me. The blurry eyes necklace moment made me realize I cling to the idea that I have perfect vision. How could I both have perfect vision and also not be able to see a necklace clasp at all?
A few weeks ago, I took my dog for a walk at a community garden that we frequent and I was blown away by the sunflowers. Apparently, I hadn’t been there for a while and a lot changes in a well-tended garden in that amount of time. It felt comical how tall and bountiful the sunflowers were in the garden, almost like they had all popped up overnight.
The sunflowers, too, were an example of impermanence. They were not there, then they were, and of course, soon they will be gone. My reaction to the change was so different because I had deemed the appearance of the sunflowers a positive one.
It may be tempting to apply this sunflowers mentality to negative changes, to focus on the positive to distract from the negative. But that, my friends, is what they call spiritual bypassing. It’s toxic positivity, pretending it’s all good when it’s not. This isn’t even a good strategy in the short term, and it certainly doesn’t work long term.
More importantly, it’s not the point of impermanence. Impermanence asks us to detach from the judgement and meaning-making connected with change, to expect that changes will happen even when something seems very steady and stable, and to not be wooed by the “positive” changes or wounded by the “negative.” Because to do so is to deny the very nature of life, this continuously changing and evolving phenomenon.
Do you get a little jittery feeling in your chest or belly when you think about the harder changes? Death, endings of relationships, unexpected endings at work or in the larger geopolitical world.
Sit with that jittery feeling, practice making friends with it, by which I mean sit with it and don’t try to change it (that’s a good way to make actual friends, too, by the way).
Whether life next brings you blurry eyes or sunflowers, you can practice embracing the fact that change will continue to be part of your experience of yourself, those you love, and the world around you. That practice may just help you to weather the ups and downs with a little more grace and ease.
