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I think a lot about how we as a culture have turned “forever” into the only acceptable definition of success.
Like... if you open a coffee shop and run it for a while and it makes you happy but then stuff gets too expensive and stressful and you want to do something else so you close it, it’s a “failed” business. If you write a book or two, then decide that you don’t actually want to keep doing that, you're a “failed” writer. If you marry someone, and that marriage is good for a while, and then stops working and you get divorced, it’s a “failed” marriage.
The only acceptable “win condition” is “you keep doing that thing forever”. A friendship that lasts for a few years but then its time is done and you move on is considered less valuable or not a “real” friendship. A hobby that you do for a while and then are done with is a “phase” - or, alternatively, a “pity” that you don’t do that thing any more. A fandom is “dying” because people have had a lot of fun with it but are now moving on to other things.
| just think that something can be good, and also end, and that thing was still good. And it’s okay to be sad that it ended, too. But the idea that anything that ends is automatically less than this hypothetical eternal state of success... I don’t think that’s doing us any good at all.
A core Buddhist concept is impermanence, the idea of constant change in our world, and letting go of fixed ideas and outcomes.
that's just the world lol
Impermanence of the individual, but the cyclic endures. Navigating the currents of history, learning from your elders, and handing your children a better world is part of the philosophy.
In the end, the goal is to escape the karmic cyclic by transcending it. You're letting go of terrestrial craving in pursuit of something grander and more spiritually fulfilling. And part of the journey is in conveying the accumulated wisdom to your juniors, with the expectation that one life is not long enough to achieve this higher existence.
I see you are holding on to that one