Impermanance and death

 

Subject: Impermanence and death



The difficulty with "impermanence” and “death” is that they become the  only non-perishable  truth on which to found ones understanding of our very existence.
The mind has an almost infinite capacity for conjecture, it can genuinely believe in almost anything given that facts aren't allowed to get in the way and if they do we simply look to discover new facts. We are also in a bind, continually thinking of our exclusiveness, our special place in the order of things and yet having to acknowledge that at the moment of death we become nil, we expire, leaving simply a void and are no longer relevant.
The Buddhists continually practice the thoughtful assessment of life and  judge any material essence in it as ‘impermanent’ always seeking  to dampen down and clarify the complex noise which we carry around in our heads as not to have much sustainable value.  The value we should choose instead are a philosophical assembled set of simple truths through which to judge  our understanding.  Only then will we find happiness and contentment. We are like the conscientious street cleaner who is happy only when the street is clean yet faces the fact that the moment it is clean it starts to become dirty again signalling the actual impermanence of the goal.
The question, rarely debated is that human-beings are a moving target. When born and growing up into adults, we are a totally different composite than when we are old.  Our aches and pains, our slow responses and faltering memory begin to redefine us and our world becomes distorted by an ‘inability’ which cloaks the old ability of which we were once so proud.
And so in old age we lurch into a world of physical and mental distortion, confused by a memory full of examples of when we did what ever it was we did and dismayed that we no longer can. That person we once were is now dishevelled by the passage of time and we have to ask the question, if we once were special, who is it have we become. The name remains the same but is there much left of the original or have we simply started to die in stages and our physical body which seemed to represent so much of who  we liked to project of ourselves, it is  now the minds recall, itself is under the stress of aging which now has to convince people that we are still in there somewhere.  Unfortunately the intervening years have produced the dissembling physique, the lines in the face, the grey hair, all characteristics of someone else and no amount of touching improves matters.
Who is this, someone else, this protesting popinjay , insistent on being acknowledged for past achievements, unwilling to face reality that we have emerged into playing a cameo part, a member of the disability parade we see hauling themselves painfully around the shopping mall.
There are exceptions like the 95 year old man who could pass for 60 or  a man like Steven Hawkins, at odds with his body he might have slipped into oblivion, his body unable to carry out even the simplistic tasks but remedied by the tasks he assigned to his mind his brain racing against time, grappling with the imponderable concept of time itself.  The confines we set ourselves seeing things as our being part of an envelope which has a start, a middle and an end. A journey through which we progress from one stage to another, convinced of our incremental certitude.

It’s a  learning curve along which we learn a little and in the end which only offers up death as a reward.