“our sadness and suffering will pass”
“Our planet has suffered five mass extinctions, the last of which occurred about 66 million years ago, when a giant asteroid believed to have landed near the Yucatan Peninsula set off a chain reaction that wiped out the dinosaurs and roughly three-quarters of the other species on earth. A few years ago, in a book called ‘The Sixth Extinction’ [2014] the writer Elizabeth Kolbert warned of a devastating sequel, with plant and animal species on land and sea already disappearing at a ferocious clip, their habitats destroyed or diminished by human activities.”[i]
The “material world” is impermanent, it comes and it goes. But put into context, we see the value of impermanence in the process of Transformation, as noted in our insight below.
Insight # 24 comes to us from Thích Nhất Hạnh (1926-2022). He was a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, poet, peace activist, teacher of mindfulness and much more.
“Thanks to impermanence everything is possible. Life is possible. If a grain of corn is not impermanent, it can never be transformed into a stalk of corn. When we can see the miracle of impermanence our sadness and suffering will pass.”[ii]
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Additional Reading:
- Impermanence, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 1
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[i] “Life as We Know It.” New York Times, The. May 12, 2019, p. 12. No writer attributed.
[ii] Hạnh, Thích Nhất. “The Practice of Looking Deeply.” Shambhala Sun. Boulder, Colorado, September 2002, p. 32.
