I recently spent a little over a week in my home town of Winnipeg, Manitoba. I lived there until I was sixteen, and then for some periods of time here and there after that. It is my fundamental dream land, the land of childhood, and the land where the people I remember and meet again when I visit have a depth to them I don’t experience elsewhere. The depth is, of course, not in them but in me.
I had a lot of surreal experiences while I was there, more than I can share in this essay. While the days were marked by forest fire smoke and a strange frequency of thunderstorms, I mourned the death of one of the people I loved the most, spent time with my daughter and son, hung out with my first real romantic obsession long turned comfortable platonic friend, experienced synchronicities, and took in the big sky and lush water-soaked prairie trees.
I also sat in a room where I once visited my very young daughter and watched her play piano, this time sitting beside her on the couch, now an adult, and watching my twelve year old son play that same piano. I watched the same son, now as tall as me, look through books at a store I’ve been going to for over thirty years, and shop for a pastry at the organic market his mother and I used to live on top of.
The experience of rooms, people, streets, buildings, seen so many times echoing back into the hallways of the mind as if reflected in mirrors going back into a long tunnel. Places and people both met as if they were living entities slowly changing in time while the things around them transform or disappear.
While there my son and I went to see my grandmother, Rya, who is now 99 years old—though rumoured to be older. She was in the hospital for a bout of pneumonia. Of all the people I visited she has changed the most, now incredibly thin, her memory for details and particular people gone, unstuck in time, floating in a sea of psychic moments that have become untethered from each other. I saw her in my mind when I was seven and used to spend weekends at her big house in the north end, the one with the swimming pool, eating her Polish-Jewish cuisine and watching how much she worried over every little thing.
Her eyes were now calm, distant, sleepy, like a small, fragile granny sloth. All of those details, and the moments and concerns which made them relevant, have now scattered like birds and are gone. As Marcus Aurelius wrote almost two thousand years ago, “All is ephemeral; that which remembers, and that which it remembers (4.35).”
The truth of ephemerality is so profound, but our minds seem to resist really contemplating it and absorbing its impact. The Buddha made it central to his philosophy— he once commented that there was another philosopher who had truly grasped it, far away in the West, named Heraclitus. I wonder if the Buddha heard about Heraclitus’ river.
Maybe we ourselves are impermanent, as the materialists currently reigning in the fading palace of modernity say, or maybe we cycle through lives, or have the roots of our being in eternity, as most humans have believed. Either way the things of this world are an ever changing, rapidly flowing river of unique moments which will never be repeated, and which each one of us experiences alone.
Of course we can share the joy— or sadness, or horror— of the same events and realities with others, but the actual experience of those events is ours and ours alone, utterly unique and unrepeatable, a face of the universe only revealed to us and to no one else, forever. Uniqueness and individuality seem hardwired into the universe in some deep and mysterious way, and no two people ever see the same face of God.
“Every man and every women is a star,” as some disreputable person once said.1 As Heidegger2 argued, the awareness of each one of us is a reception of the universe, a unique clearing where Being manifests and is experienced.
If we truly understood this, it would be enough to fill our cup of wonder all day long.
Similarly with ephemerality. If we truly understood it, surely our grasping and suffering would reduce, our dreams— or nightmares— of playing God.
Not only will this moment disappear, it already has. As Marcus wrote to himself so many centuries ago, both the remembered and the one who remembers it will disappear. So why stress so much? The thing we desperately fear will happen, the thing we desperately want to happen, may or may not happen, but either way it will run through our fingers like sand, vanish like lightning, pop like a bubble, dissolve like colours in water, and be gone.
We all might be epicenters of wonder if we understood how unique and ephemeral the pleasurable or painful, joyful or sad, beautiful or horrific things that Being reveals to us are. Of course some times— even very long times— may be so painful that we fall asleep, struggling just to find a way out. Surely though we can aspire to wake up at any moment we are given the opportunity to wake up and once again take our unique human place as stars, as places in the forest of being where unique faces of God appear just for us, moment after moment, revealed in the light of consciousness and then gone.
Flowers Photo by Freddie Addery: https://www.pexels.com/photo/blurred-photo-of-woman-in-red-running-through-poppy-field-10663593/
Water Photo by Alax Matias: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-drinking-water-from-a-tap-17042087/
Aleister Crowley, the much maligned and misunderstood experimental mystic and magician.
Another now disreputable person!
Thank you for this. I really felt the pure ephemerality and perpetual motion of existence after reading this and the cognitive fixations in the mind momentarily melted like ice cubes in the sun. No doubt they will solidify again, and become a highly important focus of attention
I am happy to have encountered Matthew Gindin. He provides a thoughtful, bright experience in my otherwise solitary and mundane life. Nice to meet a similar soul now flowing on the same pathway of time and space who speaks to inspire.