Embracing Impermanence

Each morning as I walk to the beach for sunrise and my morning walk, I approach with curiosity about what beach will greet me.

The beach is never the same twice. Each time the tide recedes, new puddles form in new places, exposing new rocks and new inlets. At high tide, my choices are more limited. I must navigate a new path to a new set of rocks, a new patch of land.

Each day brings new areas to explore, a new wonder previously hidden, a new delight.

The wind, the water, the tides, the waves, and the sun combine in different ways in each moment to create a different environment.

The rhythm repeats. The routine is the same, the elements are the same. But the landscape they produce is constantly changing.

How it was ten minutes ago is not how it is now. And how it is now is not how it will be in ten minutes.

Standing on the beach, I can fully feel the transience of nature.

I watch the waves rise from the still waters, crest, peak, and dissolve into white ash, back into the waters from where they came.

All form emerges and dissolves in this way.

The transience of the landscape — the way that no sunrise or sunset is ever the same from day to day, the way that the beach shapeshifts with the cycles of the moon and the ebb and flow of the tide — commands my attention. It demands my presence.

Knowing that the moment is fleeting, never to be repeated, I want to take it in fully, to burnish it into my bones, where it will not be subject to the whimsy of memory.