Thich Nhat Hanh teaches: “Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible.”
The first half of this is the part that scares people: everything changes. The good things end. The relationships, the periods of clarity, the times when your practice is strong and sitting feels easy — all of it impermanent. If you cling to any state, any condition, any feeling of finally having it together, you will suffer when it passes. And it will pass.
The second half is the liberation: the bad things end too. The depression. The addiction. The shame spiral you’ve been inside of for so long it started to feel like your permanent address. The pattern you swore you’d never break. The version of yourself you were convinced was the final version. All of it impermanent. All of it already in motion, already changing, whether you can feel it or not.
Rick Hanson at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center writes about neuroplasticity — the brain’s lifelong capacity to rewire itself through repeated experience. This is the science underneath the teaching. The adult brain is not fixed. Until very near the end of life, new neural pathways form, old ones weaken, the structure of thought and habit and response reshapes itself with what you practice. You are literally not stuck. The biology says so.
Joseph Goldstein, who co-founded Insight Meditation Society with Jack Kornfield and Sharon Salzberg, has two words he returns to again and again in his teaching: “Start again.” Lost in thought? Start again. Missed a week of practice? Start again. Had a relapse, a bad month, a period where you stopped showing up for yourself? Start again. Not with shame about the gap. Not with an elaborate accounting of how you failed. Just: start again.
Those two words saved my practice multiple times. There were stretches where I fell away from sitting — where the habit broke and the days accumulated and the gap got wider and starting again felt like it required more effort than I had. And then someone asking “Did you sit today?” would break the spell. Not tomorrow. Not Monday. Today. Start again.
Impermanence cuts both ways. The good things don’t last, so hold them lightly. The bad things don’t last, so don’t let them be the final word. You’re always already in motion. The question is which direction.
