Reflection on Impermanence
2026-09-13
Losing Everything and yet live in the Present
A few days ago I listened to a BBC World Service’s interview with a man who had lost everything in the recent floods along the Nepal-Tibet border. He lost his house, his belongings, everything. And yet what he chose to say, what he offered as advice to others, was essentially: don’t live in the future, don’t hold too tightly to your possessions, be in the present, appreciate what you have now, because from one moment to the next, everything changes.
I found that remarkable. People have been saying some version of it for millennia, but I found it remarkable because of who was saying it, and when. This was not an offer of a comfortable philosophy from a position of safety and not even a message of despair. This came from someone who had just watched the truth of it happen to him and had come out the other side still willing to offer it as a gift to others rather than retreat into bitterness.
A truth I keep resisting
It resonates with me because I’ve been slowly, imperfectly, trying to work on exactly this: accepting impermanence. Perhaps not impermanence as some dramatic, destructive event, but the much quieter and somehow harder truth that nothing stays the same. Ever. Not the good periods, and, just as importantly, not the bad ones either.
I’m a rational, scientifically-minded person. I don’t believe the universe is speaking to me directly. But I notice that this same message keeps arriving in different forms, through mindfulness and meditation, through what is essentially the serenity prayer’s old wisdom about accepting what you cannot change, and now through a stranger’s voice on a podcast who had every reason to say something else entirely.
This feels political too
I’ve been thinking about this alongside the steady rise of far-right movements in Europe and across the world. Part of what fuels that, I think, is a deep unwillingness in people, in all of us, to accept how little control we actually have on our existences. Politicians can mitigate present difficulties and prepare for likely future ones. This is real and worth doing. But ultimately we control very little. And when people won’t accept that truth, they get angry at politicians for failing to solve (most of their) problems that were never fully solvable in the first place. Meanwhile, plenty of politicians are happy to exploit exactly that discomfort: vote for me, I will fix it, your unhappiness has this one cause. It’s a seductive offer precisely because the alternative, accepting that some things simply aren’t guaranteed to get better or worse, is so hard to sit with.
Here’s a question that might sound naive: what would it look like if humanity, collectively, got better at this? Genuinely embracing the fact that neither politicians nor we ourselves have complete control over conditions, over existence, over what tomorrow holds. I wonder what kind of world we’d build if fewer people carried the unrealistic expectation that politics, or willpower, or the right decisions, could fully solve impermanence itself. Because the good periods were never guaranteed to last. But, and this is the part I find genuinely comforting, neither were the hard ones.
I don’t know if I’m making any real progress on any of this myself. But a man who lost everything took the time to remind a stranger’s radio audience to live in the present anyway. That seems worth sitting with for a while.