From the vantage of our current self, the self who bleeds and heals and remembers, the loss of an arm is permanent.
We don’t get to rewind.
The body can’t undo damage in the way a drawing in the sand washes away and leaves the beach as it was.
Even though nothing lasts forever, something lasts completely for us, within the boundary of our self’s duration.
And that matters to both that self and anyone else who cares about that self.
So we’re left with two truths:
Everything is impermanent. Mountains erode. Stars die. Truth fades.
But subjective permanence exists.
If our body changes, our experience is irrevocably shaped by it.
Betrayal, love, violence, art: these things etch who we are in our psyche and alter the capabilities of our physical form.
To balance this paradox, the impermanence of everything with the permanence of personal experience, maybe we should hold onto this idea:
What matters to us doesn’t have to be eternal to be real.
The impermanence of everything reminds us to not get too attached to outcomes, identities, or legacies.
It helps keep our egos humble.
Simultaneously, the permanence within a life, the truth that something can happen and mark our body and/or mind forever, can ground us.
This means we can honor what others endure.
We shouldn’t shrug off the pain of others just because “everything fades” or “we repressed how we felt about our own pain, so they should too.”
We should recognize pain shapes the journey of a specific self, which may be brief in cosmic time, but is infinite in how deeply that specific self can feel at that specific time.
Maybe the balance is to live like a sand artist who’s also a scarred warrior.
Be aware that waves are coming, but respect the stories etched in the sand before, during, and after they wash away.
In this way, we can respect one another as we walk wherever our path takes us like our forebears wished for us when they decided the world had seen enough of war after the second global conflict, which had caused the deaths of 85 million people.
This was 3% of the global population at the time.
Adjusting for population inflation, this would equal 320 million people in 2025.
Modern Issue 