A Reflection on Change

Below is a little piece I wrote on my birthday last year. I felt the need to dig it up as a reminder to myself.

“A belated many thanks, dear friends, for the birthday greetings! If you would indulge me for a few seconds and let me share a birthday experience. . . As some of you may know, I usually take my birthday seriously as a time to hie off somewhere new and different. This year, however, I felt a celebration was futile. These birthdays, it seemed, were hurling me at an alarmingly fast pace towards middle-agedom.

Finding myself at home in NY, I thought I might as well keep with tradition and find at least something different to do. So I signed up for a meditation session at the Rubin Museum. The objective of these sessions is to focus on one piece of art and let that inform the theme of the day’s meditation. It so happened that the art in focus for the day, my birthday, was a painting of Shiva, the Hindu god of creation and destruction (note: the appropriateness of it all was what prompted this (over)sharing!). We see the handiwork of Shiva all around us – winter giving way to spring; favorite independent stores being replaced by Chipotles; the skinny jeans stretched out over our no-longer-skinny legs. The notion of impermanence permeates everything. Destruction. Creation. Death. Rebirth. It is the heartbeat of the universe. It is in everything. It is in every second. With every end of a relationship, there is a potential for a new one. With the accumulation of happy moments, there is the deepening of our laugh (age) lines. The poet Robert Frost said “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.” Indeed, it does.

What causes our personal suffering, however, is when we reject this certainty. When we try to cling on to what was. Or when we desperately hold on to what is, refusing room for change. We demand this of others (“You used to do this for me. Why don’t you do it anymore?”) as much as we demand this of ourselves (back-pedaling with pills/injections/sprays/lotions/potions to the days of supple skin and vernal glow). This is a wearying way to live – our finite little bodies demanding that the world stop spinning, that the universe quit beating. How exhausting. And how futile.

What we need to do is sit still, with both palms open, within this enormous river of change – one open palm to accept whatever comes, the other to release what wants to be released. Know that ALL GOES ON. There will be deaths and there will be rebirths, both big and small ones. The recognition of this impermanence of all things and the perpetual promise of a spring will help make each moment, each birthday, one to embrace.”