The Impermanence of it All

Two years ago, I was living in the small city of Mukilteo in the Puget Sound. The whole Seattle area gets a bad rap for being a rainy and dreary place, but the hidden truth known only to the locals is that the summer months have the most beautiful days of light between the rainy ones. I lived by massive evergreens, right on top of the water, a minute’s walk away from beautiful sunsets and the gentle kisses of a tender sea breeze. Warm nights wrapped me in a tender and familiar embrace. A kind sun glided across the sky, over the water, to sleep behind Olympus. It was a corner of heaven.

I moved to Mukilteo for my first internship in the construction industry. I had no idea what I was doing; I was completely lost most days. I was trying to figure out how to be a builder and learned a lot, but it was mainly a time of confusion. Of frustration. Of uncertainty. Of loneliness.

I was scrolling through Facebook on my phone. I can’t remember exactly where I was when I saw it. Maybe I was at home, alone in my rented room in a nearly lifeless condo whose owner, although a kind and warm person, I rarely saw. Maybe I was at work, on yet another lunch break by myself in between menial tasks of copying and pasting manufacturing data. But I remember how I felt when I saw a post that tagged my friend, Mike. It was someone offering their condolences. Mike had passed away. I think there’s a reason why the phrase “hit me like a brick wall” has become a cliché—there’s no other way to describe the feelings of being served such devastating news in such a casual way.

Especially when you’re the only person in your world.

I had taught Mike while I was a Latter-day Saint missionary. He had been meeting the missionaries for a while when I came into the area, and being introduced to him was like a breath of fresh air. The way he would approach our meetings, with a deeply researched understanding of the principles and doctrines we taught, was enlightening. Any discussion with Mike would end with my having a more nuanced appreciation for the gospel and new questions for my own studies.

After I left that area, I was able to return to visit it one more time for Mike’s baptism. The love and support from his small ward community was tangible in that room, a once in a lifetime physicality of emotion.

The news of his death was just as tangible. I felt so guilty—I had not spoken to him since his baptism. For all of the good moments of my mission, it was a traumatic experience and I needed to cut a lot of it from my life to heal. Losing contact with Mike was an unintentional casualty of only keeping in touch with half of a handful of people from my mission. I still sit with a haunting feeling, wondering if I should have done more to stay in contact. I figured that he would just always be there, that maybe someday I would be healed enough to visit my mission as more than a tourist.

Mike’s death devastated me. This was the first time I had felt loss like this in my life. A sterile Facebook post was my introduction to the feeling of losing friends to the only constant of life. But then something hit me—I had forgotten about my friend from homeroom.

In high school, I had the same homeroom class from the first day of orientation until graduation. One of the guys in there was always fun to chat with. He was extremely intelligent, well-read, and loved video games. You could always find a Halo novel sitting next to his notebooks, on the tray of his wheelchair. He had muscular dystrophy. Less than a year after our graduation in 2016, he died.

I left a therapy session early to attend my friend’s memorial service in our former high school’s auditorium. The gravity of it didn’t really hit me until I realized that instead of a casket or a portrait, his wheelchair was positioned on the corner of the stage. Emotions overwhelmed me when the song “Home” by Phillip Phillips was played. It was our class song, having been released just a couple days before our freshman orientation. The school would eventually place a bench outside of the library, dedicated to my friend’s memory, honoring the books that took him to the corners of the universe that his wheelchair could not.

I was startled at the realization that the memory of someone I had been around for four years was slipping away. But then I remembered I had also forgotten about one of my high school assistant band directors, who died of sudden cardiac arrest the last night of band camp, just a few months after my friend.

Even as I write this, I recall attending the funeral mass for my brother in law’s mother. Or my own great-grandmother, Mimi, who passed away the day after my immediate family watched Coco together for the first time. I have not forgotten those memories, although I no longer feel the emotional weight I thought they deserved.

Why aren’t these memories more permanent?

Is this what’s going to happen to me?

What is with the impermanence of it all?

Just as the memories of my loved ones fade, even the spaces we build in the world erode to time. And somehow, in a way, the impermanence of it all has a peculiar beauty.

If you grew up in the United States, chances are that you, like me, were raised in a house made of wood. Most homes, mid-rise apartment buildings, and small commercial structures are built out of wood. Trees are plentiful and a renewable resource. Wood has an incredible strength-to-weight ratio in both compression and tension, is really easy to work with, and smells fantastic. It makes sense to build with wood.

It’s also something that we take for granted.

I’ve always been near trees. I was born in Alaska, raised on hikes around Anchorage. Our yard felt like my own forest. Summer days in Alaska almost didn’t turn into night and I would spend hours outside, playing with my sisters and baby brother among our makeshift forts in the clearings and the fireweed, vibrantly painted in shades of fuchsia and twilight. My family moved from Alaska when I was eight. I spent the rest of my upbringing in Washington, just an hour away from the Cascade mountains. Even my desert hometown of Yakima is surrounded by orchards that produce fruits so delicious that I struggle to eat apples and pears grown anywhere else. Our aging dogwoods stand vigilant in the front of the house, blossoming with pastel pink flowers, as if dipped in the last rays of a sunset.

But when the first great civilizations began recording their histories in Ethiopia, Mesopotamia, and other pockets of Africa and Southwest Asia, their corner of the world was void of trees. The arid steppes of my home in Yakima would have seemed a lush paradise to our ancestors. The little wood they had was too valuable to be built with. When a resource is that scarce, you must prioritize where it is used. Why waste wood to make a flammable house when you can use that same wood to keep a hundred cooking fires going, feeding and keeping a thousand people, a civilization, alive?

Because of this scarcity, the ancient world is built of stone. Stone is a very difficult and unforgiving material to work with. It’s brittle, incredibly dense, and hard to move. It has a terrible tensile strength and wears out bronze tools like nothing else. In order to work with stone, you must be very patient and very, very intentional. But if you take enough time to etch a line across limestone, fill it with sand, and pull a copper blade over it, stroke after stroke, again and again and again, until the stone cleanly splits in two, you can build pyramids that have stood sentinel over demigods for nearly 5,000 years.

Even in an age of technological advancement and engineering marvels, there is not a single building in the modern world that will stand for a fraction of that time. The internal steel structures of the strongest skyscrapers are only designed to stand for around one hundred years. Everything that we are building today will be gone within just a few generations after our time in this world ends. But the great pyramids and other grand structures of the ancient world, with their stony bodies, will continue to stand long after everything in our modern world has crumbled to dust.

But as was learned from the gods carving the Grand Canyon, even the rocks will eventually erode and disappear.

This realization shattered me. I’m a builder, so I questioned if anything I do even matters. Everything I build will be killed, ripped apart to make way for something new. I felt the impermanence of it all in my work and my life. No matter what I made or did, eventually it would be lost to time’s void. Sure, we can look back on history and remember all of the great architects, artists, writers, emperors, philosophers, and revolutionaries, and we can hope that someone will remember us that well. But we don’t know who Cleopatra or Moctezuma’s first crushes were. We don’t know who made Hamilton’s shoes. The simple reality is that eventually, we will be forgotten. We cannot escape the impermanence of it all.

It would be so easy to fall into a nihilist mindset—to feel that if nothing lasts, then nothing matters. But as I sat with a shattered heart, sifting through the pieces, I began to find that as the coronary dust was carried away by the wind, I was left with a sense of liberation.

The impermanence of it all is what makes each fleeting moment matter. It’s what makes us human. Our fragility and our temporary state are what make our lives so beautiful and meaningful.

I can’t leave a permanent mark on the world of great monuments and grandiose ideas. But I can leave a mark on time—a mark filled with love, joy, and kindness. Moments of temporary but beautiful humanity. Instances where maybe I could make someone’s day one percent brighter, where they can feel the joy in the impermanence of it all.

Someday, the memories of me and those I love will fade. Like the walls of Petra and the columns of the Parthenon returning to dust, we will all be forgotten. But I won’t give in to the feeling that none of it matters because of the impermanence of it all—because love and passion and joy do matter. They matter now.

Perhaps rocks and memories don’t die.

Their last flecks of silica and love are simply freed by the wind.