Finding Peace in a Changing World

Learning to Embrace Impermanence

Jul 09, 2025

There's something magical about watching a baby grow. As I sat feeding my six-week-old grandchild recently, marveling at how he's getting delightfully chubby and bigger each day, I had a realization that stopped me in my tracks: this is impermanence in its most beautiful form.

We celebrate this kind of change. We measure it, photograph it, and share our joy about it with everyone we meet. But this same force that makes babies grow and flowers bloom in spring is the very thing we often resist when it shows up in ways we don't want.

The Change We Love vs. The Change We Fear

Impermanence isn't good or bad—it just is, like gravity. What varies is our relationship to it, our preferences about what should change and what should stay the same. We love it when babies grow fat and healthy, but we resist when our own bodies age. We delight in spring blossoms but dread the approach of winter. We want the good times to last forever and the difficult moments to pass quickly.

But here's what I've learned: all of it is the same fundamental truth playing out. Everything changes, constantly, whether we're paying attention or not.

When Emotions Feel Permanent

Have you ever noticed how emotions can trick us into thinking they're permanent? When we're angry or anxious, it feels like we've always been this way and always will be. I'm particularly familiar with what I call "Sunday night blues"—that end-of-weekend funk where I start dreading the week ahead, thinking about all my problems, and convincing myself this is just how life is.

But I've learned to treat myself like a parent would treat a cranky toddler: sometimes you just need to put yourself to bed. How many times have you gone to sleep in a funk only to wake up and find the feeling has simply... evaporated? The circumstances haven't changed, but the emotion has moved on, just as emotions do.

The Practice of Being Present

The Buddhist tradition teaches that impermanence is the core truth underlying everything else. There's even a practice of reciting The Five Remembrances that directly face us toward this reality:

"I am of the nature to grow old. I am of the nature to have ill health. I am of the nature to die. I will be separated from everything and everyone I love."

Some people hear this and run away. But others recognize it as an invitation to face truth rather than hide from it. And here's the surprising thing: when we stop fighting impermanence and start accepting it, our suffering actually decreases.

The Paradox of Letting Go

I think of a cartoon I love: a man sitting in meditation with a thought bubble over his head. He’s thinking, "I really do want to be in the moment, just not this moment." How perfectly that captures our human tendency to want presence and acceptance—but only on our terms.

The practice isn't about getting rid of our preferences. I'll never prefer old age and death over a healthy, growing baby. But I can learn to hold my preferences more lightly, recognizing them as just that—preferences, not cosmic injustices when reality doesn't align with what I like and dislike.

Finding Peace in the Constant

When we develop what Buddhists call "experiential knowing"—not just intellectual understanding but bone-deep recognition—we start to see that change truly is the only constant. And paradoxically, this realization brings a kind of peace. We stop trying so hard to fix and freeze the world, and in that stopping, things actually do get "fixed" because we suffer less.

As the Zen teacher Joko Beck put it: "Each moment, as it is, is complete and full in itself. Seeing this, no matter what arises in each moment, we can let it be. Right now, whether happy, anxious, pleased, or discouraged, each moment is exactly what each moment is."

Living the Truth

The next time you find yourself delighting in positive change—a child's growth, spring's arrival, a moment of unexpected joy—remember that you're witnessing the same force that brings the changes you resist. Both are expressions of the same fundamental truth.

And the next time you're struggling with unwanted change, remember that this too will pass, just as surely as winter gives way to spring and babies grow into children. The technology for seeing the truth of impermanence isn't complicated: it's simply the practice of paying attention, being present with what is, moment by moment.

In a world that often feels chaotic and unpredictable, there's strange comfort in recognizing that change itself is the one thing we can always count on. And in that recognition, we might just find the peace we've been seeking all along.