The truth
We live as if the world were impossibly solid. As if “forever” were guaranteed. Spoiler alert: it’s not. There are moments that shatter that belief and reveal that reality has an unintelligible fluidity — a genuine cold shower called “the truth,” smiling at you right now.
The truth was always there — you just weren’t looking
A mother buries her child. The natural order? A cruel joke? The Universe playing games with us? I don’t know, but in that moment, the mind collapses and time — which once seemed like a continuous line — becomes a field of shards. In that brutal, unbearable instant, the truth reveals itself: nothing endures.
The truth doesn’t arrive gift-wrapped. It arrives like a dry, desperate cry in the dark. And you know what’s even crueler? The truth was there all along.
(Just like in a Fullmetal Alchemist episode.)
The lie we live — our attachments
We live as if the world were solid, but nothing is. Nothing is.
- The job that defined you is cut by email or via an online meeting;
- The person who swore they’d stay forever leaves without even saying goodbye — Ghosting Mode On;
- Material possessions, which you mistake for life’s success, evaporate in a financial emergency;
- The body that seemed invincible buckles under a diagnosis or simply under time.
The pain? It’s not in what ends. It’s in pretending it wouldn’t. Yes, that’s our drama right there, complete with a full soundtrack. The lie we tell ourselves.
Embrace freedom
Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche, a Tibetan master who watched his country be decimated by war, once said:
“Suffering arises from attachment to what is bound to change.”
Recognizing this truth is not defeat — it is the beginning of freedom. (A real kind of freedom, like: “Can I finally put down this weight I forgot I was carrying?”)
This text is not about religion (relax, you’ll survive). It’s about the one certainty we have and — remarkably — insist on ignoring. It’s about what happens to your life when you stop pretending it’s permanent, and when you stop insisting that a human being must be immortalized in some way.
The pride of being mortal
Achilles wasn’t wounded in the heel. He was wounded in the pride of discovering that, after all, he was mortal. The great tragedy isn’t dying; it’s knowing we will die and continuing to live as if we won’t.
Men built empires, wrote treatises, waged wars, and promised eternal love — all to silence that uncomfortable detail: everything passes.
(Sad soundtrack for the end of the Universe goes here — Douglas Adams would be proud of me.)
Conclusion
When we embrace the truth of impermanence, something opens up. Not as resignation from the couch, but as the clarity of a blindfold finally removed. And then, perhaps, we begin to live for real.
What about you? Are you ready and willing to face “the truth” without blinking?
- Waiting for the #serhumaninhos crowd to complain about my anthropomorphization of “truth”;
- Images from the sensational anime Fullmetal Alchemist;
- A video from someone who explains it better than I do: http://youtu.be/cUqAn-gUl2I