Impermanence

I keep trying to write about things that are going on in my life but it's just not happening. I'm just feeling too emotionally crazy right now to talk about anything mundane.

I've been watching a very long documentary, 'Walking With Dinosaurs' or something like that and it is extremely humbling and for some reason that makes me feel better.

Life on Earth began hundreds of millions of years ago. Since then, species have lived, evolved, strived, struggled, and died out. Even the dinosaurs, for example, who reined for a few million years... poof, gone.

Also since the beginning of life on this planet, the Earth has undergone so many major changes that have effected whether a species lives on or dies out. Major, MAJOR shifts in weather... millions of years of ideal tropical weather to millions of years of extreme cold and ice.

Extinction has been a matter of fact throughout history - no species is exempt from it. There are so many species today that it happens a lot more often then we're even aware of.

All it took was a comet hitting the Earth to wipe out the dinosaurs: they were just fine until that happened.

But of course, that could never happen to us, right?

It's not like, history repeats itself, or life works in cycles...

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make here, is that we humans have been here about a hundred thousand years or so. We're an arrogant creature who tends to believe we'll always be around, that nothing so horrible could happen in our lifetimes, that nothing like that is bound to happen for millions of years in the future, yada yada yada.

But logically, we should know without much doubt, that our fate is indeed, extinction. There's no reason it can't happen today as easily as it could happen in ten million years. We don't know. The earth will continue to change and go through cycles that inevitably change the climate and weather patterns - thus effecting all living things, from vegetation to humanity.

I'm sitting here, writing this at the bottom of what was once a very large, deep lake. Life if weird, and in its weirdness is awesome, uncontrollable, impermanent, and a never ending source of our curiousity.

It is by luck/fate that humans developed these large brains, giving us the ability to rise to the top of the food chain using technology rather than our own physical devices. We are unique in this way.

But I believe it's this uniqueness that allows us to be so arrogant and believe our species is so special as to be the only one in history to ever avoid the forces of nature and be exempt from extinction.

It's the same arrogance that allows us to believe life doesn't exist anywhere in the universe but here on earth, even though the universe is so ginormous that I don't think there's even a word suitable enough to describe how large it really is (and it never stops expanding).

We are smart, that's for sure. And there's a reason we evolved to be what we are. I won't pretend to know what that reason is, but I do believe everything happens for a reason.

What I don't believe, is that the earth is quite finished with us yet... we try to defeat nature, but we never do, not permanently anyway.

So, our species has been around for about a hundred thousand years. And only at the tail of hundreds of millions of years of life on the planet. Our existence is just a small fraction of history. We're pretty new to the game and there's no telling how long we'll be around.

And like I said, that is very humbling, and for some reason, makes me happy. Kinda takes the pressure off in a way, doesn't it?

Following this theme of impermanence, I watched a video earlier tonight (it came up in my feed reader) on the same subject, aptly titled Impermanence. It's a talk given by a monk on the subject of the Buddhist philosophy that nothing is permanent, everything is always changing.

I needed to hear it at this time. Emotions shift poles. Bodies live and die. The current changes. The mountain erodes. Nothing is permanent but our true selves. This too shall pass. I am not my body or my mind, I only have them to use as I see fit.

More peacefully humbling truths.
A lot for one day, but then again, good lessons to learn on days like this where all I feel like doing is lying in bed because I'm so depressed.


-Love Marylin.