When a friend at the temple reached-out to me to ask if I was going to attend the 2023 retreat, I said yes. Even as I was typing my reply to her, I was already thinking about my preparations, buying the tickets, what to pack, what it would feel like to see all my temple friends again after a Covid-filled-world had kept me away for so long….

And then, I caught Covid. Even as I sat at home, bored in quarantine, I thought about how lucky I was to have caught Covid when I did, with weeks to heal-up before the retreat…

And then, after feeling better, testing negative for 5 days, I rebounded. Even as I lay in bed, feeling crappier than I did with the first round of Covid, I kept thinking I still had 10 days before retreat, it should clear up just in time…

And then, I just kept getting sicker and sicker, still showing a bright red line 10 days into my Covid rebound, I finally gave-up, canceled my plane tickets and told my teachers I couldn’t make it to retreat.

All this got me thinking about impermanence and I realized that I would be well served not to just collect examples of impermanence, but to zoom-out and weight what those examples actually tells me about myself and the nature of the world.

Still feeling Covid-crappy, I was binge watching more Walking Dead shows. In one episode, Carol, who in the show has turned-out to be a bad-ass, machine-gun toting, zombie slayer, had gotten dressed-up in a super preppy outfit, rockin’ a cardigan, acting the part of a sweet soccer mom. I laughed out loud, the outfit and mannerisms seemingly so discordant with the Carol ‘I knew’.

And then I asked myself, “why am I so amused?” It’s because I have a permanent idea of what a badass-zombie-killer should look, act and dress like. In that one scene, and my laugh, I saw so clearly that it is me, my concepts that become fixed. The flaw is with me, not with reality. In the end, why do I think I know what badass zombie killers dress like? Zombies aren’t even real, so how would I know…

With the retreat, I was so sure I would make it. Just like with Carol, my idea was fixed. My plan was fixed. My sense of the future was fixed. But, despite my fixation, this isn’t how the world works; the world flows. It changes based on causes and conditions. When the causes for a particular outcome –like getting to go to retreat – are met then I get to go to retreat, but when they are not, my plans have to change whether I like it or not. This is natural, flux and flow. But I foolishly suffer over what is natural: I cling to my fixed notions of what things are, how they should be, what the future will look like. Laying on the sofa, longing for retreat, I was stuck, suffering, as the world and retreat flowed on.

I started considering a bigger picture, my overarching dreams for my alana life. My fantasies about my relationship, time with Eric, all the plans I build in my mind. The plans for a fun NY life that in the end wasn’t fun at all. The plans to globe trot ruined by covid. The plans to move back to SF ruined by wildfires and my asthma. Plans and the pain that arises when I get stuck on particular dreams, the effort and disappointment from trying so hard to make solid, to make real, to affix these things in reality.

I clump, I cling, like trying to compact balls of sand or silt in my hands. This is how suffering arises from tanha, craving, clinging. It is the balling-up and attempt at affixing what is always in flux. Trying over and over, becoming over and over, just to try and force flux into a single shape, for some small duration of time. Pretending that some small moment where things align into a state I like will somehow make me satisfied, till – duh — it doesn’t.

So many births, and yet I have not learned what it so obvious in front of me: Everything arises and ceases based on conditions that are not in my control. Going on retreat, that was only ever fixed in my mind.

And there is no greater fixation, nothing I attempt to clump and then cling to more tightly than atta. I take belongings and I try and arrange them, hold them, squeeze them. I see things that travel together for some time –like a group of leaves drifting on a river — and I mistake that as a clump, something that will hold together, something I can claim. But its just certain circumstances that allow those leaves to float together for a time. When wind, or currents change, when there is a waterfall that disbands them, they float apart. The idea that these collections of things, traits, people, that I float along with for a time, could be an identity, could be something permanent, this is the ignorance that has me trying to hold the clump together, tightening my grip. But the notion that these are me/mine, that’s just a superimposition.

I am so sure I know what zombie slayers look like. So sure I know what my future holds. So sure I know who and what I am. I laugh, or cry, when, over and over, I am proven wrong.

Years ago, I asked Mae Yo to explain the relationship between dukkha and impermanence. She said, “suffering comes from something stopping..it’s anything that you need to tolerate. impermanence is continuous movement, not stopping. suffering is like you want it to stop but it moves. it’s putting a stick in the water and causing ripples.” All these years later and I am only now beginning to understand her answer, in my own terms, everything flows…but me, I suffer because I want to affix.