A core teaching of the Buddha is impermanence, meaning that everything about you and your life is constantly changing. If if you're in a tough, challenging place, that's good news because impermanence can remind you to hang in there and wait for it to shift. If you're in a great place, that's good news because impermanence can remind you to enjoy it for all it's worth. Here's how author Sylvia Boorstein describes impermanence:
"Everything has a life cycle, with beauty in every part of it, and the passing of any part of it evokes a response, either of relief or nostalgia. Eighteen-year-olds are usually glad to be finished with adolescence and off to whatever they’ll do next. A woman in a class I was teaching recently said her daughter, at that point anticipating her marriage a week hence, was sad that all the excitement of planning and imagining would soon be over forever. An elderly man who once took a seniors’ yoga class I was teaching thanked me after the class but said he would not be coming back. 'It is too hard for me,” he said. “But I would like to tell you that I was a member of the 1918 Olympic rowing team.' "
"Everything has a life cycle, with beauty in every part of it, and the passing of any part of it evokes a response, either of relief or nostalgia. Eighteen-year-olds are usually glad to be finished with adolescence and off to whatever they’ll do next. A woman in a class I was teaching recently said her daughter, at that point anticipating her marriage a week hence, was sad that all the excitement of planning and imagining would soon be over forever. An elderly man who once took a seniors’ yoga class I was teaching thanked me after the class but said he would not be coming back. 'It is too hard for me,” he said. “But I would like to tell you that I was a member of the 1918 Olympic rowing team.' "
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