As a closed fist

Everything has an end.

We all know it, right?

We know it, but the moment the thought crosses our mind, we push it away like a notification we don’t want to deal with. Or maybe we don’t forget it at all, maybe we just ignore it, because confronting impermanence is like being handed a puzzle with one missing piece. We spend our short existence trying to build something that feels permanent. Something stable. Something that won’t vanish the moment we look away. A relationship, a routine, a career, a future, a “plan.” We call it "forever", but what we really mean is: “I hope it lasts at least as long as I do.”

But what does it even mean for something to end? I think we secretly believe that if something is permanent, then its value stays the same forever (with the above definition of forever), fixed, guaranteed, safe. I’ve always struggled with this idea. It affects my everyday life. And the clearest example is my habit of not fully being in the moment.

I hold my feelings back because I know the moment will end, and I don’t want to suffer when it does. So I become a spectator of time, the most valuable and unforgiving currency we have. A spectator of life.

And eventually, the moments I tried to protect myself from. . . lose their value anyway. Memories and emotions fade.

It’s a terrible nightmare.

Can you relate to that?

Traveling exposes this even more vividly. Everything ends quickly on the road. Visas expire, tours last a few hours, encounters last a few days. You meet someone extraordinary, someone you feel an instant connection with. . . and five days later, they’re gone, like your favorite character who dies in the middle of the story.

So you start holding back. 

You stop letting yourself go too deep. Because otherwise you’ll be crying your way through half the airports.

But as I’ve learned, this “strategy” only robs the moments of their value. I trade heartbreak for numbness, and the price is insanely high.

A few months ago, all of this came to a point while sitting with a coffee in an empty beach bar. I saw a Buddhist monk walking alone by the beach and I invited him for a coffee. The afternoon light filtering through the palm leaves, a gentle wind moving the bar's flags. The world around us felt calm, grounded, slow, the opposite of the chaos I had inside.

After some chatting, I asked him, slightly desperate:

    “How can I deal with the impermanence of things in life?”

He looked at me with a soft, knowing smile, the smile of someone who has heard this question about a thousand times.

    “Tell me,” he said, “what is hurting you more: that things end, or that you cannot accept their ending?”

I didn’t even know how to answer.

So he continued: 

    “You speak of impermanence as if it steals something from you. But impermanence gives value to everything. If moments were infinite, you would never look at them closely.”

He picked up a fallen flower from the ground and held it up.

    “This is beautiful because it will wither. If it stayed perfect forever, would you even notice it?”

I stayed quiet, trying to digest this.

Then he said something that shifted the whole conversation: 

    “You do not suffer because moments end. You suffer because you refuse to let moments change you.”

I felt that sentence hit somewhere deep, somewhere I usually avoid looking.

He explained: 

    “You try to capture moments like photographs: fixed, frozen, identical to what they were. But moments are not meant to stay inside you unchanged. They are meant to transform you. A moment ends, yes. But if you let it move you, shape you, teach you. . . then it doesn’t really disappear. It becomes part of you.”

He paused, then added: 

    “Your problem is not impermanence. Your problem is resistance. You hold your heart like a closed fist, afraid that feeling fully will hurt too much when things pass. But closed fists cannot receive anything.”

I stared at the floor, because he had just summarized my entire emotional life in three sentences, which was honestly rude.

    “The pain you fear,” he said gently, “is not the pain of losing the moment. It is the pain of clinging to a version of yourself that does not want to grow.”

He let the silence stretch, as monks do, a silence that forces you to meet yourself without escape.

Then he said:

“Let moments change you, and you will no longer fear their endings.”

And that was it.

I didn’t float out of the bar glowing like a lightbulb. But I understood. Impermanence isn’t a thief. It’s a sculptor. It shapes you, moment by moment, if you give it the chance.

Maybe the path isn’t to protect myself from endings. Maybe it’s to allow the moments I experience, the good ones, the painful ones, to leave their mark on me. To let myself feel the depth, the intensity, the vulnerability, even if it means heartbreak after. Because the heartbreak is just proof that I was alive for a moment.

But I think the monk was right:

Impermanence isn’t the enemy.

It’s actually the reason anything matters.