The Permanence of Impermanence

The more I age, the more I am noticing the nature of impermanence.

All things come to an end. Sooner or later. Or shall I say, they transform. Nothing stays in its current form forever. In fact, not for too long either. It is often our perception that makes time feel shorter or longer.

I used to wonder how such a massive object as the Earth moves through space at a speed of roughly 100,000 kmph. I would imagine what kind of celestial feast it would be to witness Earth racing through the cosmos at such an unfathomable speed. The thought fascinated me for years.

Then I realized that my entire frame of reference was flawed.

Everything is relative.

Even if we set aside Einstein's observation that time itself is relative, distance is already a human construct. A kilometer, a meter, a millimeter—these are units we created to help us understand and measure the world around us. They are useful, but they are also tied to the scale at which humans experience reality.

A nautical mile means little to someone who has never spent time at sea. A nanometer is almost impossible to visualize without scientific training. Numbers become meaningful only when they relate to something we can perceive.

Earth's orbital speed of about 100,000 kmph sounds astonishing because the number is large. But for an object as large as Earth, that speed is surprisingly modest.

Earth's diameter is roughly 12,700 kilometers. At its orbital speed, Earth effectively moves about fourteen times its own diameter every hour.

Seen from that perspective, the motion no longer feels extraordinary. Imagine a person six feet tall moving fourteen times their own height in an hour. That translates to roughly 25 meters in sixty minutes—less than half a meter per minute, or around 0.03 kmph.

That is barely movement at all to our understanding. 

Yet if we shrink our perspective further and imagine an ant looking at a six-foot human, that same speed may seem remarkably fast. An ant cannot comfortably comprehend a creature so much larger than itself. To the ant, thirty meters per hour might feel like tremendous motion.

Speed, then, is a matter of perspective.

And we have not even introduced the complication of time itself being relative.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that much of what we regard as permanent is simply a trick of scale and perception.

Pain feels permanent.

Grief feels permanent.

Loss feels permanent.

Yet they all pass.

The death of our dog Nero brought this thought into sharp focus once again. Fifteen years after we lost him, and three years after I lost my father, those moments remain vivid in memory. At the time, the emotions felt endless. Today, they exist as chapters in a much longer story.

Even the fact that my father lived to ninety-three and I continue to grow older myself feels less like a fixed reality and more like a point along a constantly changing timeline.

Everything unfolds in its own time.

Some events are shaped by our choices. Others by circumstances beyond our control. Most are probably a combination of both.

Last night, I found it difficult to fall asleep. My mind kept returning to Nero's final moments. I wondered whether I had missed something. Whether there was something more I could have done. Whether a closer monitoring towards its end  may have improved the ending even if it had to be.

These are questions many of us ask after loss.

But impermanence does not grant us certainty.

It only reminds us that every moment passes, whether joyful or painful, whether understood or mysterious.

Perhaps that is the only permanence the universe offers us.

Impermanence itself.