The Flood

Nothing is granted. One day things work the way we want, and the next one we lose it all.

It goes for material possessions, people, the city we live in, our life, or the planet we inhabit.

We only get to lease. It’s up to us to cherish what we temporarily have, nurture things and people to keep them close, and be grateful for the memories.

Buddhists call it impermanence: everything is bound to change. The sooner we accept it and prepare for it, the better we will be.

It presupposes cultivating a form of detachment. We are not our smartphone, our job title, or our birthplace. We are not defined by the people we hang out with or the labels imposed on us.

Attaching ourselves to these details isn’t just a source of suffering, it ties us down into an illusion of security. It prevents us from being more.

I’m not saying we need to shed our identity entirely and stop standing for anything. I’m proposing we must keep learning, re-evaluating our values and our relationships to individuals and stuff, without tying ourselves to dogmatic viewpoints: “I don’t know, therefore I seek” is the only viable answer to our doubts.

Life is all about experimenting. If it takes 5 years to become proficient at something, you can shed your social status 12 times between your 20’s and your 80’s. 

We all will have to reinvent ourselves, one moment or another.