Chapter 48: Beauty of Impermanence
Buddhist Temple. Chiang Mai, Thailand
Today, 5 weeks into chemotherapy/radiation and 2+ months into COVID-19, I reflect on the concept of impermanence.
In Buddhism, impermanence is a fundamental teaching. Buddhists, myself included, often meditate and reflect on the idea of impermanence, the constant unalterable change of everything in our lives. As a scientist, I equate this idea to that of entropy. The laws of thermodynamics are, strangely, quite similar to the ideas taught in Buddhist philosophy. I guess it doesn’t really matter who our teachers are, what matters is that we are open to learn.
I promise that this blog will not have a chemistry or physics test at the end, but I do think these are interesting concepts to think about. As a reminder, the first law of thermodynamics tells us that energy cannot be created or destroyed. The second law of thermodynamics speaks to what happens to energy when it is transferred/transformed, since it cannot be created or destroyed. As energy is transformed in an isolated system (essentially, in our universe), some of it is wasted. Entropy is essentially a measure of this “wasted” energy, or energy that is not available to do useful work. This wasted energy leads to increase randomness, or disorder, of a system.
The second law of thermodynamics tells us that the total entropy, or disorder, of the universe is always increasing.
A simple way to think about the concept of entropy is to think about dumping one of your pandemic puzzle boxes out on a table. Will the pieces fall together in a nice, neat, complete puzzle? That would be cool, but likely not. It is easier for the universe to trend towards disorder than order, with puzzles, and with our lives.
In other words, unpredictable change is always coming. From the smallest particles living things are made of to our entire universe as a whole, everything moves towards messy, unexpected, disorderly change.
The Buddha reportedly said, “Nothing is permanent. Everything is subject to change. Being is always becoming”
On of my favorite zen Buddhist teachers, Thich Nhat Hanh, takes the concept of impermanence and tells us simply, “It is not impermanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not.”
Emotions, physical health, age, relationships, praise, criticism, exciting news, difficult news; all of these concepts are impermanent. Slow drivers in front of you, traffic jams, toilet paper out of stock at the store, furlough, social distancing; all of these things are impermanent, too. Today I remind myself on my 24th radiation treatment that thankfully radiation is impermanent also.
Why is this helpful, you may be wondering? Perhaps its not. Many of us like to live in a bubble of “stability” imagining that everything will stay exactly the same. At least, pre-COVID-19 we did. I used to live in this bubble. It was safe and cozy in there. Then, the bubble burst. Entropy, impermanence, life all came at me and taught me a crash course in reality that I wasn’t necessarily ready for.
Unfortunately, permanence is fiction. Whether you read Buddhist teachings from 2500 years ago, or slightly more modern, scientifically validated laws of thermodynamics, you may see that really only one thing lives forever in our bubble of stability, and that thing is change. Damn!
Fortunately, change can be beautiful too.
Fondly,
Courtney
© CB2020