Tiris

Even right at the start of things, you can feel the sense of an ending. The way you’re still only settling into vacation while mentally preboarding your flight home, or how soon after starting a new relationship you start to wonder exactly how this one ends. Even before you’ve purchased the carton of milk in your hands, you’re already turning it over, looking for the expiration date.

In the end, all goods are perishable. Everything is transient. Look down at your wedding ring and you can already see it shining on your granddaughter’s hand, knowing she’ll occasionally spin it around her finger when she gets nervous. Fill up a journal or frame a family photo, and you can already feel it sitting in a box on the shelf of an antique shop.

So it goes, and such is life, and this too shall pass. Anicca and anitya, mono no aware, sic transit gloria mundi, amen. But back when you were a kid, you couldn’t help but look at the world like a still life painting, pretty and static and hopelessly boring. If you were lucky, there were people around you who tried to insulate you from change, who were there to reassure you, “Don’t you worry, I’m not going anywhere. Not for a long time.”

As a result, you couldn’t help but feel shocked when things started disappearing without warning—your best friend moved away, the video store closed, the family dog grew old and died. That incipient sense of loss is what drew you closer to those still alive and well, and gave you a reason to pay closer attention, hoarding details like a honeybee rushing from flower to flower, because you knew summer wouldn’t last forever.

Eventually with the benefit of years, you began to notice shifts too subtle to register from one day to the next. How quickly a bouquet starts to wilt, how a fringe of white sweeps over your father’s hair. You keep reminding yourself to make peace with the churn. But for some reason you still find yourself shocked when things change in ways you didn’t see coming, as if you keep falling for the same old sleight of hand.

Of course, sometimes you have to thank the gods that nothing lasts forever. It’s a relief to know that your mistakes will start to fade as soon as they hit the page, that when the harvest fails, a new spring is already on its way. We don’t have to wait long for another shot at redemption.

Other times, the impermanence of everything around us feels haunting. To think that a thousand-year-old cathedral won’t always be there. That entire cities can be forgotten in a manner of decades, vibrant languages dwindled into obscurity, fearsome gods relinquished to old books, old books turned to dust. How casually the world discards our work, with nothing but a shrug. There’s even an odd comfort in hearing how long it takes for Styrofoam to decompose—all the better for humans to have left some sort of mark on this world, as if each discarded coffee cup is just another way of saying, We were here.

‍You begin to wonder: Why bother making long-term plans? What’s the point of getting invested, when the sitcom will only get canceled, the house will break apart, the sand mandala swept into the trash? Why let yourself fall in love with someone when the best-case scenario is you’ll end up losing them?

This question has persisted for centuries, appearing in so many songs and poems and conversations by those who came before us. Some of their tombstones are still around today, for a little while longer at least. It’ll be a while before the rain wears away the granite. The mountains too are steadily crumbling away, inch by inch, year by year, soon to be recycled back into the fiery mantle from which they came. Alas, even the world is not long for this world, soon to be swallowed up by the sun. Soon enough the stars will burn out, too, leaving little else but an echo of radiation, reverberating in a heatless void. And there will be no way to tell that time is passing at all.

There’s a certain kinship there, shared by all things. The stars and the tombstones, the family dog and the honeybees. A comfort to think that we are all united in our impermanence. Because if even the mountains have lifetimes, and our own galaxy will one day be no more, then there’s no solid definition of what permanence even means. Eternity, infinity, forever: these are nonsense words, poetical abstractions, useful only to spice up mathematicians’ thought experiments. The finiteness of reality takes it out of the hands of the gods and gives us control. Without an objective yardstick to establish what eternity looks like, it’s up to us to define what timeframe we view as normal, and calibrate our own understanding of what fleeting and lasting really mean.

You can take a summer afternoon playing yard games with your family and make it last for years. Spend an eternity sitting by the fire with your loved ones, or tell a bedtime story to your kids that they’ll remember for eons. Grow a garden, and revel in its sweetness for a little while, before it all withers away, buried in snow and ash. Drop by to visit with friends, chatting about nothing particularly important. Call your parents. Go out and look at the stars while they’re still visible. Doodle away in the margins, and make art for its own sake, even though you know it won’t last more than a few thousand years. You can sit in a chair listening to music, while music still exists; you can curl up and read a good book while the language is still alive, while the words still have meaning.

The meaning of things isn’t an emergent property of how long they last. We are the ones who define them for ourselves, if only for our own satisfaction. It is an honor reserved for mortals; we just have to have the courage to do it. To decide for ourselves which fleeting, precious, interminable moments we’ll carry with us right to the end. Maybe to the mountains, they won’t amount to all that much. But to the honeybees, it’s more than enough.

To the honeybees, summer never ends. They live for a few months at most, barely long enough to feel the seasons change. They have no need to remind each other to put themselves out there, gathering their rosebuds while they may. You can hear them buzzing deep in their hives, trading bits of sweetness they’ve gathered out in the world. How easily they pass the nectar back and forth between their bodies, freely mixing it all together as if none of it made a difference, knowing they’ll never live long enough to taste it all.

And yet, their honey is the one thing that never expires, that never loses its sweetness. Maybe that buzzing sound is just another way of saying, We are here.