I have written a lot on transience before for those who are reading me for long. It’s still something that comes back to me to pen about. In a world that idolizes the illusion of permanence, it is the ephemeral that unveils life’s most sublime truths. For it is only in surrendering to the exquisite fleetingness of each passing moment that we taste the untamed essence of what it means to be gloriously, vibrantly alive. The impermanent is the gracious doorway to presence, to the depth and poignancy found in what blossoms, lingers briefly, and dissolves once more into the mystery.
Those fixated on grasping at the mirage of stasis, on perpetually extending experiences beyond their delicately unblooming interlude, are forever chasing an illusion that strangles the very beauty they seek to possess. They turn away from the wondrous opportunity to witness how elegantly all arises, subsists for a fleeting breath, then releases into the foundational emptiness from which the next rapture is conceived.
True magicians of the ephemeral understand that to bear witness to the urgent poetry of a cherry blossom unfurling, one must also honor the autumnal cascade of its disintegration back into soil. The fragrance of any bloom carries within it the inevitability of its fading perfume, every apex containing the seed of its descent. Yet our society reflexively flees from this core premise – that every person, structure and experience arises only to exhale away once more, mingling with the constant flux of becoming and ceasing. We become consumed by the myth of ownership, forgetting we are but momentary custodians of life’s sacred unfoldings, not their eternal landlords. We strive to defy nature’s wisdom by armoring ourselves against the one constant reality – that of perpetual dying and renewal.
Those who have fathomed the depths know that it is only by embracing finitude that we finally awaken to infinity’s beating heart. The delicacy of a last exhale before dissolution? The hidden light burrowed in every departure’s inescapable darkening? In learning to become intimate with the ephemeral, we shed all that insulates us from the vibrantly throbbing truth – that we are timeblossoms, whole kaleidoscopic universes spinning from and returning to the oceanic origin every instant. Our very being, as impermanent as a snowflake’s crystalline caprice, is sculpted by the intimate flirtation between form and formlessness. And it is this seemingly paradoxical romance of eternal momentarity that endows our fleeting existence with the supernova grace required to behold its own sacred beauty and depth.