Learning to live with impermanence

Hello, my friends!  The roller coaster of life has taken me away from blogging as of late, but I sure miss being here on WordPress amongst good peeps and fellow writers.  I’m beginning to feel rather rusty as a blogger, but when I found myself musing about the impermanence of life this morning…I thought I would try to crank out a post.  Please bear with me as I clumsily get my thoughts down on paper (Well, on the computer screen, you know what I mean 😊). 

Most of us seek permanence.  We focus on building long-term relationships, sustainable careers, strong roofs over our heads, etc.  We are determined to ward off that which makes us feel vulnerable, unsafe, or unhappy, trying to build the walls around us stronger and more durable.  We fight off change with everything we’ve got.  But the impermanence of life is there to remind us that the only constant in this life is that it is forever changing…and THAT will never change.  Seeking permanence is like chasing a mirage through the desert.  You keep running toward it but can never quite put your hands on it.

My life feels awfully impermanent right now.  As I have written about before, my husband is sick and has a stage IV diagnosis.  His western medicine doctors don’t offer up much hope about his quality of life or possibility of healing.  Recently, we started seeing a holistic doctor and we saw some great improvements in a short time.  Unfortunately, my husband is feeling poorly again, and we are both feeling the heaviness of this let down.  We will continue with the path we are on as it does appear to be helping, but the ups and downs of this health journey bring on a lot of stress, anxiety, and make it difficult to hold on to hope… though I AM holding on to hope. 

Life is incredibly fragile, and it is not permanent, no matter how much we want it to be.  I have learned this painful lesson before and have no wish to face it again, but no matter what I do… I will lose those that I love at some point, or, they will lose me.  But one thing that I have learned about emotional pain is that it is also impermanent, even if it feels like it will last forever.

This reality is hard AND I have choices to make. 

I am going to do my best to choose to live each day in a peaceful, fulfilling way.  I will do little things to make myself happy- read, write, spend time with friends, sit in the sauna, play fetch with my puppies, be generous to others, and lay out in the sun.  I am going to do my best to set aside my fears regarding the impermanence of this life and focus on really LIVING this life.  I know there will be days when there are more tears than smiles, but I am going to try to let go of my fear of impermanence. 

Thank you for reading!

Trying to find my sparkle,

Grace