Five years ago, I wrote about a Tibetan word I had discovered while reading The Comfort Crisis. The word was mitakpa, and it roughly translates to impermanence.
The idea was simple enough: everything born is subject to death and decay. We are all walking toward the edge of a cliff. We can pretend the cliff is not there and act surprised when it appears, or we can acknowledge it and allow the destination to change how we travel.
At the time, that idea hit me like a truck.
My mother had just died. She was sixty years old, which had always sounded like an old age right up until my mother reached it. Then it sounded impossibly young. Grief had made death real in a way that books, sermons and funeral-home visitations never had. The cliff was no longer a philosophical exercise. I had watched someone I loved reach it.
I wrote that making peace with the destination could change the course we chart toward it. I thought about who was walking beside me, what we were doing along the way and how many flowers I might regret passing without ever stopping to smell.
I still believe every word of that.
What I did not understand was how easy it is to see the cliff clearly and still stand in the same place.
Awareness is not action. Clarity is not courage. Knowing that time is limited does not automatically stop us from wasting it. Sometimes it only makes us feel more sophisticated while we continue doing exactly what we were doing before.
I have spent portions of the last five years thinking deeply about time while using it poorly.
I have told myself I needed to be more present with my children, then caught myself looking at a phone while one of them was talking. I have known that certain relationships deserved more attention while continuing to give them whatever energy was left after work. I have thought about books I wanted to write, changes I needed to make and conversations I should have, then stored them all in that enormous warehouse called later.
Meanwhile, the children kept growing.
The little boys I once carried in one arm became young men with their own opinions, schedules and worlds. My daughter stopped being the tiny child in so many of my favorite photographs and became a person who notices more than I would sometimes prefer. The changes happened gradually enough that I could miss them from one day to the next, but quickly enough that an old picture could knock the breath out of me.
That may be the cruelest trick time plays. It moves too slowly to frighten us today and too quickly to forgive us tomorrow.
The original lesson I took from mitakpa was to appreciate life because it ends. Five years later, I think the harder lesson is that appreciation without action can become another comfortable idea.
It is possible to love your children and still fail to give them your attention.
It is possible to value your health and continue neglecting it.
It is possible to believe a dream matters and never risk making it real.
It is possible to know where the road ends and keep driving as if we have unlimited gas.
I do not say that as someone who has solved the problem. I say it as someone who has become increasingly suspicious of his own ability to turn insight into a substitute for movement.
Recently, I finished writing a book I had been meaning to write in one form or another for years. Finishing it did not transform me. Angels did not descend. My bank account did not suddenly develop a six-pack.
But the file exists.
It can be read. It can be disliked. It can fail.
That matters because the imaginary version could do none of those things. It was protected by someday. The real one had to enter time with the rest of us.
Maybe that is what I missed five years ago. The cliff does not merely ask whether we appreciate the walk. It asks whether we are actually walking.
I still do not think about death three times a day. I am not trying to turn every Tuesday morning into a funeral meditation. Life is heavy enough without manufacturing dread before breakfast.
But every so often, I try to remember that the page will close.
Not to scare myself.
To interrupt myself.
To put down the phone. Make the call. Write the paragraph. Sit in the bleachers. Say the thing while the person can still hear it. Stop saving the life I claim to want for a future version of me who may never arrive.
Five years ago, I made peace with the existence of the cliff.
Now I am trying to become more deliberate about the road.
What part of your life have you been meaning to live later?
Yelco State of Mind 