Impermanence

Time flows. Like a silk fabric. Like perhaps a river that does not take the drop in it to where it was at the previous instant. Time does not stop to be admired. It flows, untamed, carrying with it moments that dissolve before we can fully grasp them. And between these arrivals and departures, we live, between the first note of a song to its final chord, between the breath of a hello and the silence of a goodbye. And yet, being humans, we long for permanence, as if things were meant to be fixed in place, untouched by time’s unraveling hands. 

    To think of it, is impermanence really a loss? Or is it the movement, the transformation, the very essence of existence. We look at the stars in the night sky. They are all dying, most of them have already died. The rivers will never hold the same water twice, and the hands we held as children are no longer the same. So does it all boil down to existentialism? Or, could we accept change as life’s most intimate form of art and ride along?

    If life were permanent, would it still be worth to marvel at? A sky that never darkens would make us forget the brilliance of a sunrise. A song that never ends would lose its meaning. It is the brevity of a moment that makes it luminous.

    Consider music: every note fades as soon as it is played, yet the melody lingers in us. A dancer moves through space, leaving no trace but the memory of motion. A firework blooms into the night sky for mere seconds, yet those seconds feel infinite in their intensity. Perhaps life itself is like this, a series of brilliant flashes meant to be experienced, not captured.

    We build, we collect, we hold tight to things as if they belong to us. But does anything truly belong to anyone? The books on our shelves will one day belong to another, the homes we cherish will shelter strangers long after we’re gone. Even our bodies, which feel so intimately ours, are borrowed from the earth, destined to return to it. Ownership is a construct; everything is merely passing through our hands. And there is a strange comfort in this, knowing that we are not burdened with keeping anything forever. We are here to witness, to touch, to experience, and then to let go.

The Art of Letting Go

    There is a reason autumn feels poetic. The trees shed their leaves without mourning them. They do not resist the inevitable; they surrender to it with grace. Perhaps we should do the same; with our pasts, with our expectations, with our attachments.

    Letting go does not mean forgetting or discarding. It means embracing the idea that everything is in flux. The friendships that drift, the opportunities that slip away, the versions of ourselves we once were. All of these are part of the movement of life. We do not lose them; we become them.

    What if, instead of trying to hold on, we learned to live in the vanishing? To love fully, knowing it will end. To embrace experiences without fearing their departure. To stand in the fleeting and say, ‘This is enough.’

    Because, in the end, the most beautiful things are those that refuse to be captured, the laughter that fades into the night, the sunset that melts into darkness, the presence of someone who once sat beside us, now only existing in memory.

We are all just passing through. And maybe that is the most beautiful thing of all.