Nothing You Love Will Stay — and Why That's Not a Tragedy

It catches you off guard. You're looking at an old photo and realise the child in it is grown and gone. Or a song from years ago plays and the person you were when you first heard it feels like a stranger. For a second the floor tilts: nothing has stayed where you left it.

Then, almost always, we look away. The thought is uncomfortable, so we bury it under the next task and carry on as if the things we love are solid and waiting.

But some part of us knows. We know the people we hold will change, that moods pass, that the body we're so sure of is quietly ageing, that even a perfect evening is already leaving as it arrives. We just don't like to sit with it.

The old traditions did sit with it — for a very long time — and reached a conclusion that sounds, at first, like bad news. Nothing is permanent. They had words for it: the Buddhists called it anicca; Indian thought called it kshanikata, momentariness.

What's surprising is that they did not treat this as a tragedy to be mourned. They treated it as the single most freeing fact a person can absorb. This is an attempt to see why.

Here is the observation the texts start from. Take anything that looks steady and stare at it long enough, and the steadiness turns out to be a trick of speed.

A candle flame looks like one unchanging thing. It isn't. It's a different flame every instant — new gas, new burning — only replaced so fast that your eye stitches it into one. A river looks like a thing with a name. But the water you point at is gone the moment you point; the 'river' is just a shape that water keeps passing through.

Now turn it on yourself. The body you call yours has quietly swapped out most of its cells since childhood. The 'you' reading this is not, atom for atom, the you of ten years ago. Even your thoughts: watch the mind for one minute and it is never still — one thing rising, holding, dissolving, the next already coming.

The Buddha put it in three flat words: 'सब्बे संखारा अनिच्चा' — all made things are impermanent (Dhammapada 277). Not some. All. Anything that was put together will come apart, because being-put-together is itself a temporary state.

This is not gloom. It's just accurate. The solidity we feel everywhere is real at the speed we live, the way a film is smooth at the speed it runs — but it's made of change all the way down.

If everything changes, where does the suffering actually come from? This is the careful part, and the traditions are precise about it. The pain is not caused by impermanence. It's caused by clinging to the impermanent as if it were permanent.

Think about how a loss actually hurts. The hurt isn't only that something ended. It's that we had quietly decided it wouldn't — we built our footing on it, leaned our weight, assumed it would hold. The change was natural; the assumption that it wouldn't change is what breaks.

The Gita names this with surprising plainness. 'मात्रास्पर्शास्तु कौन्तेय… आगमापायिनोऽनित्याः' (2.14) — the touches of the world, heat and cold, pleasure and pain, come and go; they are impermanent; so, Krishna says, learn to bear them. Not to escape them. To stop being overturned by the simple fact that they arrive and leave.

Here is the hinge most people miss. The texts are not telling you to love things less, or to hold your child at arm's length so the parting won't sting. They're pointing at something subtler: that you can love fully and still hold loosely — give your whole heart to a thing while knowing it is passing.

The grip is the problem, not the love. You can open the hand and keep the warmth.

The old insight lands strangely in our time, because almost everything around us is engineered to deny it.

We photograph every moment, as if a saved image could stop the moment from leaving. We chase a version of the body that never ages and feel cheated when it does. We want relationships that stay exactly at their best, careers that only climb, a feed that freezes the highlight and deletes the decline. More than any people before us, we have tools that promise permanence — and we half-believe them.

The ancients had fewer illusions, simply because they lived closer to the turning. Lamps went out. Harvests failed and returned. Children were born and elders died in the same house, in plain sight. Change was not hidden in the basement of life; it was the weather you lived in. So a teaching that said 'nothing stays' wasn't a shock to them. It was a name for what they already saw.

We've hidden the turning so well that when it arrives — an illness, an ending, a face in the mirror we don't recognise — it feels like a personal betrayal, a system failure, something that went wrong.

It didn't go wrong. We just lost the older skill of expecting it. The Gita's blunt phrase for the world — 'अनित्यमसुखं लोकम्' (9.33), this impermanent, restless world — was never an insult. It was a clear-eyed description we've spent a great deal of effort trying to forget.

Now the turn that changes everything. We assume permanence would be better — that if only things could stay, we'd be happy. But sit with it honestly and the opposite shows up.

Imagine a sunset that never faded. By the third day you would not see it. The thing that makes a sunset pierce you is exactly that it's leaving — you look harder because you can't keep it. Permanence wouldn't preserve the beauty; it would erase it. A flower that never wilted would just be plastic.

So impermanence isn't the enemy of what we love. It's the reason any of it is precious at all. The passing is not a tax on the beauty — the passing is what makes it beauty.

This quietly turns 'nothing lasts' from a reason to grieve into a reason to be present. If this evening with these people will not come again — not exactly, not these moods, not this light — then there is nowhere to be but here, and no time to be elsewhere in your head.

That is the practical gift hiding inside the gloomy-sounding fact. The point of knowing things pass is not to hold them at a distance so the loss won't hurt. It's the reverse: to be here for them completely while they're here, because you finally understand that 'here' is the only place they ever are.

There's a fear under all of this, and it's worth naming: if nothing stays, doesn't that mean nothing matters? If it all dissolves, why love, why build, why try?

But that's a misreading, and an important one to clear. 'Nothing stays' is not the same as 'nothing matters.' In fact it's the opposite. Things matter because they pass. The impermanence the texts point to is not a reason to check out of life; it's a reason to show up for it, fully, while it's running.

Notice too what this asks of the ego. So much of our anxiety is the effort to make a permanent self — to nail down an identity, a status, a story about who we are that will hold forever. Impermanence quietly loosens that grip. You were never meant to be a fixed thing; you're a river, a flame, a dance — and there's relief in stopping the fight to freeze.

The lesson, in the end, is gentler than the fact first sounded. Hold what you love with an open hand. Let the sunsets be sunsets. Stop demanding that the river stand still so you can finally feel safe — safety was never going to come from things staying put.

So here's the small question to walk out with. If you truly took it in that this moment won't return — not to mourn it, but to meet it — how differently would you be living the very ordinary hour you're in right now?