Ephemeral Being
Journal Entry
I have been aware of ephemerality for as long as I can remember.
As a child, I would cry over flowers because I knew they wouldn’t stay that way. I could already feel time pressing in on them, soft and invisible, draining their color, dulling their fragrance. It felt cruel, almost, that something so alive could be quietly taken apart without anyone noticing.
When I was 11 used to believe, really believe, that if I focused hard enough on a moment, I could keep it. That presence itself was a kind of spell. I would sit there, hyper aware, trying to anchor myself into the now as if my attention could stretch time, thin it out, make it linger.
But time doesn’t respond to devotion like that.
It doesn’t slow down because you love something.
It doesn’t pause because you finally understand its value.
It just… continues.
And I think something in me broke a little when I realized that.
Why are we so resistant to this? Why does time feel like something we’re always bracing against, rather than moving with? I wonder when that fear settled into us… if it’s something ancient, woven into the human body, or if it was taught to us somewhere along the way. Somewhere between childhood wonder and adult awareness, time stopped feeling like a companion and started feeling like a thief.
I found my way, early on, to the idea of impermanence. To teachings that said: this is the nature of life. Everything changes. Everything dissolves. The attempt to hold on is the source of suffering.
And I understood that… intellectually.
But understanding something doesn’t mean you’ve made peace with it.
Because there is still a faint grief in me that lives beneath it all.
People say life is beautiful because it’s fleeting. That transience is what gives it meaning. And maybe that’s true. Maybe permanence would dull everything, make it weightless, forgettable.
But sometimes I wonder if that’s just something we tell ourselves to soften the edge of it.
Because there are moments, small, ordinary, sacred moments, where I don’t want beauty to be enhanced by loss. I don’t want the awareness of its ending to be what makes it precious. I just want it to be. To exist fully, without the shadow of its own disappearance already forming behind it.
And yet, that shadow is always there.
It follows everything…
At times, I feel like I’m moving at hyperspeed through my own life, trying to stay conscious, trying to witness it as it happens. But no matter how present I am, I’m still carried forward. Moments collapse into memory faster than I can hold them.
It’s like standing in a river and trying to cup the water in your hands.
You can feel it. You can touch it.
But you cannot keep it.
Sometimes the fleeting nature of this life doesn’t feel so poetic and tragically beautifully, it feels suffocating.
Like the air is being pulled out of my lungs by the sheer speed of it all.
Moments don’t just pass… they careen. They collapse in on themselves before I can fully arrive inside them. And I’m left there, half present, already grieving something that hasn’t even finished happening.
There are times it makes me feel almost sick with awareness.
Because once you see impermanence, you can’t unsee it.
It’s in everything. Every touch already ending. Every laugh already echoing. Every version of yourself dissolving as it forms.
Nihilism starts to creep in me.
That soft seductive tongue whispering sweet nothings in my ear.
It wraps itself around my mind like something warm, something comforting. It whispers: nothing lasts, so nothing matters.
And for a moment, that almost feels like relief.
No pressure or weight.
But that’s the illusion of it.
Because the truth is… I do feel the weight.
I feel it in the moments when my chest tightens when I realize how quickly everything is slipping through me. I feel it in the exhaustion of trying to make meaning out of something that refuses to stay still long enough to be understood.
I am tired of carrying this awareness.
Tired of noticing how everything beautiful comes with an expiration date stamped invisibly beneath it.
Tired of loving things that I already know I will lose in some form or another.
Tired of existing in a reality where holding on is impossible, but letting go doesn’t come naturally either.
It’s a strange place to live…
between reverence and grief.
Between wanting to savor everything and wanting to shut it all out just to breathe.
Because sometimes it doesn’t feel like “the beauty of fleeting things.” Sometimes it just feels like loss, happening in slow motion.
Maybe that’s the real tragedy of impermanence—
not that things end,
but that we are aware enough to mourn them
while they’re still here.
˚₊‧꒰ა ♡ ໒꒱ ‧₊˚
