How The Temporary Becomes Eternal

The importance of impermanence

There is a particular kind of heartbreak stitched into everything beautiful.

One of my favourite times of year is cherry blossom season.

Which is right now, where I live.

Actually, it’s sadly on its way out — as most of the cherry trees with their blossoms are becoming more and more bare. Less blossom, more branch. The vivid pink, pale pink, or white blooms, depending on the type of tree, are all disappearing at different rates. Cherry blossoms are a symbol of impermanence. Of the fact that everything is temporary, everything is fleeting. They are beautiful but they are only around for a few short weeks.

It’s why part of the memorial tattoo I have for my mom: a barn owl on a branch, has cherry blossoms on it. To remind me of the impermanence of life. The fact we’re only here on earth for a short time, before we, too, are gone. Just like the cherry blossoms. Here one moment, gone the next, in seemingly the blink of an eye.

It’s something I try to remind myself of regularly — impermanence.

The concept of impermanence is something that brings a special je ne sais quoi, a certain vividness, to us being here on the rock spinning through space at a million miles an hour.

Fresh flowers on the table — they start wilting at the edges even as you admire them.
A bonfire roaring against the night sky — destined to collapse into embers before the sun rises.
The perfect song you stumble across on a restless night — gone too fast, the last note hanging like a kiss you didn’t know would be the last (which reminds me of that song Kiss Me by Dermot Kennedy — go listen to it right now if you’ve not heard it, it’s hauntingly gorgeous).

The truth is: everything you love will either leave you, change, or end.

That’s just the way of life. Everything is born (or started), grows and dies.

For a long time, I tried not to think about it. I tried to grip tighter, to capture things in photographs and journals and forever-promises. As if by recording it, I could keep it safe from time’s greedy hands. As if loving harder could somehow freeze the moment where everything felt whole.

It never worked.

Flowers still browned.
Friends still moved away.Loved ones died.
Moments still slipped between my fingers like sand.

The hourglass of time keeps forever flowing.

At first, this made me angry, upset. (Isn't it cruel, to make things so beautiful if they're only going to be taken away?).

But little by little, I’ve discovered that impermanence isn’t the enemy. It’s what makes things important. Precious. It’s the very thing that makes the beauty matter.

The campfire is gorgeous precisely because it’s a brief, golden rebellion against the dark of night .
The first snowfall is sweeter because it will eventually melt.
The hands you hold today feel sacred because one day, they’ll let go.

When you love something that doesn’t last, you love it differently.
You love it without trying to hold so tightly onto it.
You love it knowing it’s on loan to you for just a brief time - whether that’s a moment, a season, or a (finite) lifetime.

And because of that — you love it more fiercely, more freely, more fully.

You stop saving your best self for later.
You stop holding back your feelings and emotions.
You stop telling yourself you’ll "appreciate it properly" once things settle down.

No. You live inside it. You say yes to the picnic even if the sky looks a little iffy. You laugh a little louder at the joke even if it’s silly. You pick the wildflowers even though they’ll be wilted by tomorrow. You tell people you love them today, not someday.

Because someday is a myth.

There is only now.
This messy, fragile, breathtaking now.

As the Emily Dickinson poem is so beautifully titled: Forever is composed of nows.

So here’s the cold, hard, stark truth. A reminder that’s a punch to the gut:

We don’t get to keep the things we love.

But the important thing is we do get to love them.

And that — that love — leaves something behind that is permanent.
It changes us.
It opens us up in all the right ways.
It teaches us to be more vulnerable, but at the same time braver, more awake. More alive to wonder.

Loving things that don’t last is not foolish. It is the purest form of courage. It takes bravery to know that one day it’ll be gone, but still stick around to experience it.

And maybe, in the end, that’s the only kind of love worth offering: the kind that knows it can’t stay — and shows up anyway.

What things bring the concept or reminder of impermanence to you?

Thank you for reading! Grateful to have you along on this journey with me.

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