"Flowers decompose, but this does not prevent us from loving flowers. In fact, we love them more because we know how to treasure them while they are still alive."

That is a quote from the Thich Nhat Hanh, the writer and Zen teacher who died in 2022. It is from an essay he wrote on the topic of impermanence.

I've been thinking a lot about impermanence lately.

Before the pandemic, I had to have physical therapy for a pain in my left hip. The cartilage was disintegrating, something that is common as you get older. I was in my 50s then, and this was annoying. I hadn't injured myself in an accident, I hadn't even been running or rowing or riding my bike or lifting weights. Nothing strenuous. I had simply stepped off a curb incorrectly.

One moment everything was fine, and in the next a piece of my body that I had taken for granted no longer worked properly.

But physical therapy is a miracle. It works. For months, I would go to the PT place and do some simple exercises, stepping on and off things, stretching, holding weights. I struck up a casual friendship with the therapists, a fun group of people who clearly their jobs. Slowly I got better and eventually the pain went away. And the insurance company said I was cured, and that was that.

Not long ago, I happened to walk by the PT place and the sign was gone. I did a google search, and I saw it was out of business. As if it had never existed.

Impermanence.

Here's another story. A few years ago, my daughter was in a thrift store and discovered a black ceramic mug with the logo of the student newspaper where I was an editor in college. She knew that had been an important time in my life.

So she bought the mug and gave it to me as a gift.

I was so fond of it that I kept it in the bathroom as a water cup for taking pills and brushing my teeth and so forth. And one morning I went to set it on the sink, but my hand slipped and the mug fell to the tile floor and shattered. Just like that. It was gone.

I googled around to see if I could replace it on ebay or something. No luck. Gone, gone, gone.

I thought about how during ango this year, our period of winter study, we talked about the teachings of the insentient. Rocks, sticks, shoes, ceramic mugs, all the ten thousand things. They have their own dharma. One of those teaching is about impermanene.

Living things are not permanent, either, of course.

When I was 14, I had a black cat named Shadow. Man, 14, that is a tough time, isn't it? Maybe 14 was ok for you, it doesn't really last hat long, it only seems like forever, but for me 14 was not great. That cat sometimes felt like my only friend. He was frisky, wild. Nobody else could deal with him. He used to tear around the house. He scratched up my hands and arms playing. But we had a connection.

One day I noticed that he was sort of lazy and lying about, bloated, not moving much, lying outside in the sun on the patio. I was worried. I was about to leave on a 9th grade class trip to Washington DC, so I asked my parents to keep an eye on him. While I was gone, they said, he got worse, he was breathing funny, so they took him to the vet. It was feline leukemia, a highly contagious disease among outdoor cats. He was getting worse, and the vet recommended they end his suffering, so they put him down. When I got back from the trip, my parents broke the news. They said they had spent the weekend crying at the kitchen table. They knew how much I loved that cat. And I guess they had come to love him too.

I never got to say goodbye. I still remember Shadow lying on my chest, purring, like it was yesterday, but it was 48 years ago.

A decade after that, my mother died. She was 63, about a year older than I am now. Cancer. I was working at a newspaper in Baltimore at the time and she had been in and out of the hospital. I called her on my 24th birthday. I had to work that day but I was planning to drive up for a visit later that week. I told her that I loved her. Not long after, in the middle of the night, she got up to go the bathroom in the hospital and, weakened by the treatments she was undergoing, had an aneurysm or some kind of stroke, fell down and died.

My father lived another 10 years, alone in the house where I grew up, far upstate in Rome NY, and I would drive up there whenever I could. The family house was kind of a rundown museum of my family, with rooms full of books and tools and boxes of magazines, and guns and fishing rods, and quilts my mother had crocheted, shelves of canned pickles and tomatoes from when she was still alive, a mounted deer head on the wall, a 10-point buck that my father had killed. He had been a big hunter, an outdoorsman. When he died, we had a hell of a time cleaning the house out. The junk was piled high in the gravel driveway.

He was an avid grower of vegetables and flowers, a gardener, and he had an asparagus bed up on the hill on the edge of a farmer's field. It was the most delicious asparagus I have ever tasted. I have never tasted anything like it since. The asparagus bed is overgrown with weeds now, gone to seed, and the people who bought the place probably have no idea they've got a secret treasure up there.

My father had a favorite Italian restaurant in our home town called the Savoy. When I was growing up, we used to go there all the time. After he retired, he used to eat there two or three times a week. They had a picture of him on the wall. It was the social center of the town, owned by several generations of the same family, the Destitos, started by an immigrant from Italy at the turn of the last century. They were a political force in the area and one of them was even elected to the State Assembly. My father was the treasurer of her first campaign. Family tradition, I guess.

We ate at the Savoy after each of my parents' funerals. They are buried in a cemetery nearby. That's why my father bought a plot there, imagining us visiting their graves and then going over to the Savoy to have some pasta.

He died the year I moved to New York to work at The Times, the year before I got married, three years before his granddaughter was born. Time flew by. I was busy witth the job and and didn't have much reason to go back to Rome all that often. I used to think about driving everyone up to Rome for one last meal at the Savoy. But it's a long drive, five or six hours. I kept putting it off.

A couple of years ago I was googling around, and I saw the news. The Savoy was closing its doors. It had survived two world wars, the great depression, the ups and downs of the last 50 years. But the covid pandemic had done it in. 114 years in business, and now it was gone.

Nothing in life is permanent. Not a ceramic mug, not a piece of cartilage in my hip, not a restaurant, not a zendo, not the people we love. All forms disintegrate and become other things, eventually.

It's not impermanence that makes us suffer, Thich Nhat Hanh points out. It's wanting change to stop. That wanting makes us suffer.

If you think for just a moment about it, true permanence would be terrible. Children would never grow up. Tyrants would never die. Everything would be at a standstill. The sun would never rise or set. There would be no seasons. The cycle of life would stop, dead plants and animals would not nourish the soil so new life could bloom. No fresh asparagus. No cold, fresh water from a ceramic mug. The idea is impossible, nonsensical. Nothing in the world can remain the same for even an instant, and that includes the self, our egos, our minds.

Breaking my favorite mug did not destroy what made it special, the fact that my daughter saw it and thought of me. That is why I cherished and used it every day until it broke. I could have put it on a shelf behind glass, but that would have been showing a lack of respect for it, for the teachings of the insentient. That would have meant I was not allowing the mug to do its job, to be a mug and to remind me of my daughter. And it would have broken someday anyway, when I was no longer around to worry about it and protect it.

If you sit long and hard, you realize that the self is impermanent… There's something else

Thich Nhat Hanh said we must nourish our appreciation for impermanence every day. We do this through zazen, sitting meditation, the study of the self. Just like a ceramic mug, the self has no permanence from moment to moment. It is always changing.

And that brings us to this moment. Let's all take a deep breath. Look around. Feel your body. Are you here?

BOW

I gave this talk on May 23, 2024, at Still Mind Zendo in Manhattan.