Welcome to The PATH (Monday Meditation) — A weekly reflection with three timeless insights for daily life. This week’s reflection searches for ancient lessons on how the world works (Permanent, Personal, and Perfect).
1. Permanent
What if I said that life is not permanent, personal, or perfect? Does it bring a sense of tranquility or anxiety? It is critical across traditions that we understand how the world works. One must accept these types of eternal truths to live a good life. The quote, “Life is not permanent, personal, or perfect,” comes from the longtime meditation teacher and author Ruth King, which I initially heard Eric Zimmer say (a previous podcast guest) on the One You Feed podcast.
Granted, the idea of impermanence is not new to us; but it is worth revisiting again and again. The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus put it, “Nothing endures but change.” Although we know this to be true, we quickly and often forget. The Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi (discussed in my conversation with Bryan Van Norden) explained,
“Life, death, preservation, loss, failure, success, poverty, riches, worthiness, unworthiness, slander, fame, hunger, thirst, cold, heat - these are the alternations of the world, the workings of fate. Day and night, they change place before us, and wisdom cannot spy out their source. Therefore, they should not be enough to destroy your harmony; they should not be allowed to enter the storehouse of the spirit. If you can harmonize and delight in them, master them and never be at a loss for joy; if you can do this day and night without break and make it be spring with everything, mingling with all and creating the moment within your own mind — this is what I call being whole in power.”
Impermanence is how the world works, an eternal truth that one must accept and embrace. Wisdom traditions point to clinging or desiring things to be permanent as a path to suffering. On the other hand, the Buddha observed, “All conditioned things are impermanent — when one sees this with wisdom, one turns away from suffering.”
2. Personal
Similarly, life is not personal. It is not for or against you. For this reason, many wisdom traditions emphasize living in accordance with nature or in flow with life. In the short book The Way to Love, the theologian and psychologist Anthony de Mello urged us to realize that the tree provides shade to everyone — even the person chopping it down.
The psychotherapist and author David Richo writes in The Five Things We Cannot Change that there are five unavoidable givens, five immutable facts that come to visit all of us many times over:
“Everything changes and ends. Things do not always go according to plan. Life is not always fair. Pain is part of life. People are not loving and loyal all the time. These are the core challenges that we all face. But too often, we live in denial of these facts. We behave as if somehow these givens aren’t always in effect or not applicable to all of us. But when we oppose these five basic truths, we resist reality, and life then becomes an endless series of disappointments, frustrations, and sorrows.”
How does the above passage sit with you? For some, it may sound uninspiring. Nevertheless, it is how the world works — life is not personal. We naturally desire to make sense of life, piece together puzzles, and connect the dots. But if we were to go on a field trip to a children’s hospital and meet a group of young kids battling cancer, we would see firsthand how unfair life can be. If we were honest, we would admit we have no idea why.
In the bestseller, Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved, Kate Bowler writes, “Everything happens for a reason. The only thing worse than saying this is pretending that you know the reason. I’ve had hundreds of people tell me the reason for my cancer. Because of my sin. Because of my unfaithfulness. Because God is fair. Because God is unfair. Because of my aversion to Brussels sprouts. I mean, no one is short of reasons. … When someone is drowning, the only thing worse than failing to throw them a life preserver is handing them a reason.”
In truth, we have no idea why most things happen.
3. Perfect
Strangely, many philosophers and theologians stress the importance of living with and in the imperfection of life. The sixteenth-century philosopher Michel de Montaigne said, “Learning to live, in the end, is learning to live with imperfection and even embrace it.”
How good are you at embracing imperfection?
How might your life, relationships, and work change if you embraced the truth of imperfection? Stranger still, the wisdom of imperfection can be a key ingredient to living the type of life you truly want to lead. There is no perfect path. No straight line from where you are to where you will go.
For example, the artist Vincent Van Gogh stressed,
If one wants to be active, one must not be afraid to do something wrong sometimes, not afraid to lapse into some mistakes. To be good — many people think that they will achieve it by doing no harm — and that’s a lie. That leads to stagnation, to mediocrity. Just slap something on it when you see a blank canvas staring at you with a sort of nonsense.
Exploring the eternal truths of life connects with what the Buddhists describe as seeing clearly. The philosopher Nic Bommarito (a previous podcast guest) writes in Seeing Clearly: A Buddhist Guide to Life that we must confront the brutal facts of life. “It’s a bit like a therapist helping a patient to work through unpleasant realities to better deal with them.” The goal is not to dwell on upsetting or traumatic situations, explains Bommarito, but to face facts responsibly and with the right mindset.
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Thank you for reading; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well,
What a wonderful, wise article! Than you!