A Lesson in Impermanence

The Tibetan horse has been well beaten, I know, and if it is not entirely dead, I'm sure it is not for lack of trying. "Free Tibet": stickers, marches, rallies and many other such things have, no doubt, already said anything I could dream up. But bear with me while I mumble through some thoughts...

I perused Time magazine today, and came across an article on the recent trip the rinpoche lama made to Tibet. One of the things that interested me the most was the apparent need of the Chinese government to wield absolute control over everything. The magnitude of their fear is intriguing.

I never imagine fear on a larger scale. For me it has always been an individual matter; it's me against that huge hairy girl-eating beast with 8 legs that just crawled out of my shower drain. (Do you find that this only ever happens when you are on the toilet and too far away to kill it, or to grab a suitable killing device, before it targets you as its next meal?) I can not imagine the breadth of the kind of fear that would prompt a national government to so oppose a few small cute old religious men. But then, I am just as incapable of imagining another Gandhi type revolution. Maybe some people aren't.

All of this very rudimentary political commentary aside, the rinpoche made a very interesting comment about the impermanence of things. Which brings me, somehow, to questioning if there really is anything enduring. There is a startling absence of any guarantees in life; we are too transitory. Formerly, I may have said that at least religious ideals were likely to prevail, even if everything else changes. But those too seems to have learned a way of slowly becoming like the murmur of a lonely man in a crowd, until finally, they depart, largely unnoticed, and seldom missed.