I Don't Know (or Anicca)

Impermanence in the Modern World

You may have played Warcraft, the computer game, when it first emerged more than 30 years ago. I used to play it with my two children who were assigned male at birth.*  One of the things I still remember from the game was the way it moved forward. The horizon in front of me – where the game was headed – only emerged as I played - a city, a road, a mountain range, rolling hills, adversaries - appeared gradually and unpredictably ahead of me. 

The Warcraft horizon is a powerful metaphor to me. What is going to happen will only emerge as we move forward in time; it is not visible to us now.

I don’t know.

“I don’t know” is one of the most powerful and honest sentences in the English language. It is a confession of our inability to prevent change, keep things as they are, predict with certainty.

The only thing I know for certain is that one day I will die. I don’t know when or where or how; few of us know that. I might like to keep things as they are, stay as healthy as I am. But to use a word that reappears constantly in Buddhist practice, everything is impermanent. Everything will change. This is the reality of anicca, the Pali word for impermanence.

Everything, even the rocks on the mountains or at the sea, will change as weather, snow, wind, water, human presence, erodes them. Death, itself, is a reflection of anicca.

This thought comes to me as I grapple with my own aging and health, which keeps changing, and the gradual cognitive decline of my siblings. I see impermanence in the rapid warming of the planet. I see it in the unpredictable fate of American democracy, the rise and fall of migration and immigration, the fate of Ukraine, the destruction of what was a Palestinian enclave in Gaza.

Even writing this column is subject to change. What I intend to say only emerges as I begin to write; it has never been written before. I have a general sense, like a topic – anicca and today’s world - but only when my fingers start to tap the keyboard does the landscape begin to appear, word-by-word.

Impermanence and change, the blank slate, the white canvas, most creative work emerges and evolves in this way. 

It is sheer hubris to think we can resist impermanence and unpredictability. Humans want do that – stop the world as it is now. I am especially struck by the application of impermanence to what humans are saying and writing about the “real world.” 

These days, especially, it is deucedly hard to avoid change, to predict what is going to happen. That reality stops no one from asserting, with certainty, what is coming. My inbox, the Internet, social media and the general media are littered with thousands of columns predicting specific outcomes of things like the November elections in the US, the stalemate in Ukraine, or the endgame in Gaza.

Not only are there too many writers, but the cacophony points in every direction.  You can literally choose an opinion to support your own, dismissing everybody else. None of the writers and commentators and “influencers” actually know what will happen.

But they are all pitching for attention with the voice of certainty, hoping politicians, policy makers or the administration or Israel or Hamas or Putin or Zelensky or someone will read it and do what the writer is calling for, so certain are they of the likely outcome of what they are pitching. Take something as ludicrous as Tucker Carlson’s interview with Putin. It is all pitchman stuff, promoting the commentator, and interaction driven by ego, not particularly by truth or likely outcome.

It is ironic, of course, that I would write a column about impermanence and change, trying to pin this elusive butterfly itself to the page. Away it will fly as quickly as you read it.

This is the message for me. Beware of certainty in a world of constant change. We all try to see into the future, to make the unpredictable predictable. Be modest in your claims; calm your anger that comes from being “certain” about what is happening and will happen. The parameters of annica are very wide. Netanyahu may think the destruction of Hamas will bring peace; he does not know that and, in my view, much of what he has done for the last 20 years has reduced security for the Israeli people, leading to ever more destructive actions. But, you know, that is just my informed attempt to pin the future of Israel and Palestine to the page. Putin might hold on to eastern Ukraine. Or not. Nobody truly knows, as the current military stalemate amply shows.

I am not arguing that one should do or say nothing. Instead, I am arguing against the self-promoting hubris of anyone who asserts to know, for certain, how the landscape will emerge going forward. Against anyone who has the perfect recipe for peace in Ukraine. Anyone who asserts in February that Biden’s age will be a central issue in November. Anyone who can tell you who will win the presidency, the Senate, or the House. A lot of supposedly “smart” people were certain that the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 would open the door to democracy in the Middle East. Or that supporting democracy movements in that region would lead to greater freedom.

The horizon has not appeared and things will change. I even have to tell it to myself. My projections are uncertain. I only know things will change and the horizon will appear slowly.

Today I avoid the urgent demand in the media for my attention to absolute certainty about the future. Bloviating commentators are bloviating. Writers are promoting the self, not the truth. Drama and urgency sell and provide platforms to people who are selling themselves through a false “certainty” about what will happen if actors do what they are calling for.  

So, keep asking questions; remain skeptical; look for the contradictory, as I suggested on this page recently. I find if I open to uncertainty and impermanence, to the fluid movement of the future as it appears, I rest easier. I can keep my eyes on the open horizon in front of me.

* Why so awkward a circumlocution? Out of respect. One of them is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns. If I expect that respect for myself – a non-binary person – the very least I can do is provide it to them. I also have a daughter, whom I include in my progeny, but whose childhood precedes Warcraft.