You Know Everything Passes, So Why Are You Still Afraid of Losing It? Questions About Impermanence

"You know all this. Everything passes."

"So what if I know. My hands are still shaking."

Eleven on a Wednesday night, and the phone screen showed three missed calls from my mother. I was sitting in the car in the basement of my building, phone on silent since a meeting. In the two seconds before I hit call back, my heart was up in my throat and my head ran through everything I did not want to think.

She picked up on the second ring. "Just checking you got home, it's pouring out there." That was all.

I sat in the car a while longer, both hands still on the wheel. I have meditated for close to ten years. I have read about impermanence, heard talks on it more times than I can count, told myself that everyone is parted from everyone eventually. And three missed calls still did this to me.

If you have caught yourself in the same place — understanding enough, believing enough, and still afraid — here are some questions I have carried for a long time. None of them gets a neat answer. But in a few places I have come to see things differently.

Understanding impermanence is not a pill that stops you fearing loss. Nor is it a ladder where, climb high enough, you reach a place where nobody can move you any more. If you are measuring your practice by whether you are still afraid, that ruler is probably measuring the wrong thing.

You understand impermanence, so why are you still afraid?

Two seconds in a car park

Back to those two seconds in the basement. In that moment I was not thinking about impermanence. I was not thinking at all. My chest tightened first, my hands went cold first, and only then came the pictures in my head. The understanding arrived last, after my mother had already said "it's pouring out there".

The familiar explanation is that I did not understand deeply enough. If I really understood, I would not shake. I believed that explanation for years, and it left me ashamed every time I was afraid, like a student who studies and studies and never learns the lesson.

Understanding and fear live in different places

Later I saw it differently. Understanding lives where I think. Fear lives where I love. The two do not run at the same speed, and fear always gets there first, because it does not need to think.

There is something harder to admit, too. For a long time I had quietly been using my understanding of impermanence as an insurance policy: understand it well enough and loss will hurt less, fear will shake me less. So each time I still shook, it felt as if my own practice had let me down. It never promised that. I had attached the promise myself.

Looked at straight, the fear of loss is the shadow of having something precious. Someone who loves nobody does not shake at three missed calls. Understanding impermanence cannot erase that shadow. What it can do is much smaller: help me stop treating the shadow as proof that my practice has failed.

Muttering the fear into silence

There is one way of using impermanence I relied on for a long time: whenever I was afraid, I muttered "this too will pass, this too will pass". It is tempting because it sounds right and looks composed. But used like that, the phrase becomes a lid, and fear kept under a lid does not go anywhere. It just waits to come back bigger.

These days, when the fear flares, I do a few very ordinary things:

The first time, naming the fear can make it sharper, and you may feel worse than before. That is normal. The way to know you are doing it right is not that the shaking stops. It is that the time between the shaking and doing the next thing gets shorter.

After a week or so, you usually start naming it earlier, sometimes the moment it arrives. On a rushed day, one silent word, "afraid", and one out-breath are enough. If you want more on understanding something and still hurting, four misconceptions about impermanence has a section on exactly this.

So should you love a little less, to fear a little less?

"Ten years of meditating and you're still this scared? Just hold on less."

Thang said it at the little street-corner coffee stall, stirring his milky coffee, half joking.

"Hold on less means love less?"

"Well… more or less, yes."

Advice that sounds a lot like wisdom

I tried living by that, not really because Thang said it, but because I thought the same. For one year I called home less, went back to my parents' town less, and told myself I was practising non-attachment. I did feel lighter, for a few months.

Then one evening my mother said on the phone, "Lately you talk to me like I'm a customer." I still remember it.

Loving, and demanding a guarantee

Looking back, my mistake was merging two things into one. Loving someone is wanting them to be well while they keep changing: getting older, getting slower, telling the same story three times. What made my hands shake was something else. I was demanding a guarantee, demanding that the people I love stay here, exactly as they are, until I am ready.

In Buddhism, what is usually described as the root of suffering is clinging — demanding that something changing stand still — not loving anyone. I had known that for years. But it took the year of calling home less for me to see it clearly: I had cut back the love, and the demand for a guarantee was still fully intact.

Being less attached does not make a future loss lighter. It only makes the time you still have together poorer. And the fear was still there, just covered by a layer of busyness.

Going cold and calling it clarity

The easiest slip with this question is pulling your feelings back and calling it progress. It is tempting because it works fast: less fear, less worry, and people even praise you for being calm. But the cost is paid by your family, who never signed up for your practice.

Instead of loving less, I tried demanding less. Each time I noticed myself gripping — calling over and over, over-instructing, getting irritated that my mother would not go to her follow-up appointment on time — I asked: am I worried about her, or about my guarantee? The question does not end the worry. But it usually makes the next thing I say to her softer.

Loving family when you know one day they will be gone: how do you live with that?

Sunday lunch

Sunday lunch at my parents' house. A pot of sour soup with sesbania flowers, the tang of tamarind rising and mixing with the incense on the ancestors' altar. My father poured tea, his hand a little unsteady, a few drops spilling over the rim. My mother told the story of a cousin's wedding for the third time that month.

I was sitting there, and a thought pushed into the middle of the meal: how many more lunches like this are left.

Fear wants to rehearse the goodbye

The familiar advice is to treasure every minute, because you never know which time is the last. I tried to live by it. The result was that every meal became a rehearsal for saying goodbye. I took photos, recorded my mother's voice, tried to say things that really mattered, and got home as drained as if I had been to a funeral.

What was actually running there was not appreciation. It was fear trying to get ahead, so that when the loss came I would already have done some of the hurting. Like grieving in advance. But grief paid in advance is not deducted from grief later. It only takes away today's lunch.

Knowing that a day of parting will come is worth knowing. Carrying it into every meal is something else, and that part is optional. Some lunches only need to be lunch: the soup a bit salty, my father complaining the braised fish is bland, my mother telling an old story for the third time.

The first time, you may feel stiff, and that thought may push in more often than you expected. That is fine. The way to know you are doing it right is that on the way home you remember what you ate and who said what, instead of only remembering the ache.

After a few times, the thought usually still comes but stays for less time. On days you cannot visit, a five-minute call just to ask what everyone ate today is the same practice.

Treating every time as the last

The slip here dresses up as kindness. "What if this is the last time" sounds like a reason to love more. But living every visit as the last one makes you tense, and your family can feel it. Once my mother asked, "Why are you looking at me so strangely today?" I had no answer.

Instead, I keep the two things in two places. The knowledge that one day we will be parted gets the private moments: sitting alone, meditating, writing. Time with my parents gets to be ordinary time. That ordinariness, looking back one day, is probably what I will most want to have kept.

When the fear of loss is bigger than you

When fear needs someone alongside

There are times when the fear of loss is no longer a thought that pushes into a meal. It is there most of the day. You call to check on family several times a day and still cannot settle. You lose sleep night after night to pictures you do not want to see, your heart races or your breath goes short every time the phone rings, or you avoid seeing people altogether because you are afraid of thinking about it.

If this goes on for a few weeks, or starts to affect your sleep, your eating, or your work, it is no longer something to manage alone with a practice. Seeing a doctor or a psychologist is the step to take. It does not mean you are weak, and it does not mean your practice has failed. This article cannot stand in for that.

And if you have just lost someone, and are in the first weeks, the questions in this article may not be for now. At that point you do not need to understand impermanence. You need someone with you.

If you have tried and the fear is the same

The first common reason: you are doing these practices with the goal of not being afraid. When the goal is no fear, every time you are still afraid counts as a failure, and you will give up within a few days. Make the goal smaller: doing the next thing decently while you are still afraid.

The second: today's fear is carrying an old story. A past loss that was never fully cried through, a midnight phone call some year long ago. Then three missed calls are not just three missed calls, and a two-minute practice cannot reach that far. That is when a trained person alongside you can help more than anything you read.

And some people find that naming the fear makes it bigger, not smaller. If that is you, drop that step and keep only your feet on the floor and the next concrete thing. No method suits everyone.

The next morning I called my mother back, for no reason at all. She told me the mango tree behind the house had flowered early this year, then asked whether I had eaten breakfast. I stood on the balcony and listened to all of it, including the part she told twice.

I am still afraid of the day there are no more calls like that. I will probably be afraid until that day comes.

But that morning, the call was still there.