Trigger Warning: Mentions of Death
At nine years old, I attended the funeral of my grandfather. As someone who had stayed close to me throughout my childhood, the thought of not having my grandfather around for the rest of my life was something that consumed my small mind with great trepidation. Amidst the candor of the Hindu dharmic rituals, I heard the priest performing the final rites, chanting for an easy journey for my grandpa’s soul. A safe journey from one body to another.
And it was there, amongst the ever-flowing smoke of the sweet incense, when I discovered the concept of ‘cosmic impermanence’.
What I learned, through my intellectual ventures further, was that the soul is a constant traveler through planal bodies and universes, something that exists outside the boundaries of time. But the very fact that even this permanent entity assumes cycles of impermanent creation and destruction piqued my interest. While the years that followed my childhood after age nine were spent in scrutiny, searching for the soul of my grandpa in every living being on this earth, the thought that nothing was to stay forever, took a seat in the crevices of my mind.
When I went into high school and lost a handful of my middle school friends, the same concept that had taken a backseat in my head, came into the forefront. “Not everything is meant to last forever” is how I pacified myself going to wage the war that was teenage life. This was only the start of what was to be a gradual unveiling of this theory in my life.
The wonderful metamorphosis of growing up from a child to an incandescent adolescent was also a change in itself. Then changed the kind of people I kept around in my life, the clothes I’d worn all my childhood grew uncomfortable to the eye, and my entire closet changed.
But somewhere, between all these titchy changes, was the very real fear of a greater shift, one that wouldn’t be easy to digest, and the very same fear the nine-year-old me had carried was slowly coming back into focus. Losing someone to death and to the travesties of time were two equally scary things. But losing myself to my race against the world was the scariest one.
“The human nature is a particularly volatile beast. You don’t know when it catches you with its most brutal transformations.” A particularly philosophical teacher had once told us. At that moment, this simple sentence had gotten me spellbound. Are we all beasts tethered by our volitions? Do we hold enough power to cruelly transform ourselves, polarly different from our present selves?
“I’m a Gemini, I don’t like change.” was what I had kept repeating to myself and the entire world while I was trying to adorn different personalities to please the people in my life, to just fit in somewhere, in the crooks of a maddening crowd that was threatening to consume the very same volition that was tethering me. And it was only after the bloodbath, only after I had revoltingly shifted entire worlds in my head to fit into a box, did it finally dawned on me. The weight of that one sentence. Human nature is truly a volatile beast, that could carve us into things at every step of the way, with more changes yet to come.
When I finally got out of school, probably the biggest of all the changes, I had finally made my feisty heart believe that there was nothing to fear. The change was a phenomenon that seldom someone escaped. Change could be good or bad, but it was not for us to decide. But change was necessary, change will always be necessary to render color to our souls, to bring meaning to life. Life is an impermanent cycle, full of shifts and cartwheels, and heads over heels. And somewhere along the way you learn to live with change.
The realization that impermanence is the only entity that enshrouds not just life, but death as well, serves as a soothing reminder. The otherworldly divine nature of this process is something mere mortals like us have no choice but to live with. When I finally looked at myself in the mirror, an entirely changed being from that nine-year-old to that 18-year-old, I found solace in the fact that somewhere along the brutal process of trying to fit in and trying to uproot the ideals of my life, I had shed one very real fear. Something that might end up being a minutely infinitesimal achievement in my life. The fear of facing change.