We Forget That Nothing Is Permanent
The moment the words landed, I felt something in my body give way.
I dropped to my knees.
There was a strange disorientation, like the ground had shifted and I hadn’t caught up yet.
I couldn’t tell if I was crying or something else was happening entirely.
It was that in-between place where shock lives.
Because in an instant, something I had quietly believed would always be there… wasn’t.
And everything I thought we still had time for felt suddenly uncertain.
It’s part of my work to receive difficult news.
People share things with me every day that are tender, complicated, sometimes even shocking.
I’m not easily rattled.
But this was different.
This landed somewhere deeper.
Since then, I’ve been sitting with something I thought I already understood.
How fragile life actually is.
Not in a dramatic way.
In a very quiet, clarifying way.
The kind that rearranges your sense of what matters … without asking permission.
It reminds you that life is not something to assume.
That time is not something we are promised.
That the people and puppies we love will not always be here in the way they are today.
There are truths we all know intellectually.
And then there are truths life makes sure we know more deeply.
One of them is this.
Nothing is permanent.
Not the roles we play.
Not the identities we build.
Not the relationships exactly as they are today.
Not the bodies we live in.
Not even the quiet assumptions we make about how much time we have.
And still, it’s easy to forget.
We get comfortable.
We settle into rhythms.
We step into roles that help us feel competent, needed, successful, loved.
We assume there will be more time.
And we tell ourselves we will get to the deeper questions later.
But life doesn’t always wait.
Sometimes it interrupts.
Sometimes it changes something we thought was steady.
And sometimes it simply makes it impossible to keep pretending that everything will stay the same.
I’ve been thinking about this not just because of that moment, but because I can feel it in my own life too.
The chapters are shifting.
I can feel myself standing at the edge of a new decade, looking back at a life that has held so much, and forward into something I cannot fully see yet.
The older I get, the more I see that different eras of life ask different things of us.
What once felt central begins to loosen.
What once defined us begins to evolve.
What once felt certain reveals itself to have been a season, not a promise.
There is grief in that.
There’s no way around it.
But there is also something else.
There is a kind of freedom that comes when we stop pretending things are permanent.
Something softens.
We become more present.
More honest.
More willing to ask the questions we may have postponed.
Questions like
Is the life I am living still true for me?
What am I holding onto because it once defined me?
What am I postponing because I assume there will be more time?
What might life be asking of me now?
Over time I’ve come to see that much of our suffering is not just from change itself, but from resisting the fact that change is the nature of life.
We want certainty.
We want guarantees.
We want the old map to keep working.
But life keeps moving.
And at some point, we are asked to move with it.
Not by forcing anything.
But by telling ourselves the truth.
Maybe that is part of what it means to grow older with some wisdom.
Not to harden.
Not to cling.
But to soften enough to let each era of life teach us what it came to teach.
The longer I live, the more I see that life keeps inviting us to evolve.
The question is whether we are willing to listen.
And whether we are willing to listen for what life might be asking of us now.
A quiet question for you
Where in your life might you be holding onto something as if it were permanent?
If you feel moved, please share in the comments.
Over the coming weeks I’ll also be sharing more about the work I do in A Liberated Life, where we explore questions like these in the company of thoughtful, heart led people who are willing to tell the truth about the chapter they are in.