I saw a new word today: Impermanence. The dictionary says it’s the lack of permanence, something transient, temporary. Most likely, I already knew the word, but seeing it in print hit me harder than it should have.
My oldest grand-daughter just turned 5 a week or so ago. As I watched her pregnant mother, my second daughter, fussing with all the details at the birthday party, it reminded me that it wasn’t so long ago I was celebrating HER 5th birthday. Another daughter brought her two over to my house a few days later and as I helped my grandson trying desperately to load a nerf gun and “loaned” a few coins to the my granddaughter so she could play with a toy vending machine, it struck me that a year ago neither would have been interested in either task. Something was different now.
Today, as I was picking my son up from work, I watched him come out of the building. He was laughing and talking with a co-worker. They stopped and although I couldn’t hear the conversation, I saw a level of maturity in my son’s mannerisms as the conversation played out that took me by surprise. With it came the sudden realization this was not the boy I thought I’d dropped off.
Just for giggles, I googled the house I grew up in and looked at the satellite image. The picnic shelter my father and brothers had built had been torn down as well as the barn I used to escape into when I wanted to be alone. Now, there’s a fenced back yard, trees missing, and a second driveway to a huge garage and a pool sitting where my mom always planted a garden that was much bigger than was ever necessary. Funny, I guess I had always figured those things would still be there, no matter who owned the property, but the landscape was different. Altered. “Improved”.
Everything changes. It’s an eventual progression, an erosion of what doesn’t belong anymore, or a subtle shift toward whatever comes next. There’s no stopping it, no controlling it, and no real way to even measure it in the moment. It can only be measured with hindsight, where memories mark the changes like old video tapes being rewound so all the little differences can be seen in their glaring reality. Initials carved in trees are cut up with the firewood, graffiti is painted over, records are broken, gravestones fall and get reclaimed by the soil, old songs stop being sung, and the list just keeps going.
Impermanence. Not something that’s occupied a lot of my mind up to now, but I suspect it will become much more of a focus in the future.