We are a culture that fights change with everything we have. We deny it, delay it, treat its arrival as misfortune. And nowhere is this more visible than in how we meet death — the most inevitable change there is.
We sterilize it. The moment someone dies they are removed from sight, taken to a place where the living need not look. They are embalmed, dressed in fine clothes, covered in makeup — the whole elaborate apparatus of a culture determined to maintain the fiction that what is lying there is not a corpse. We do everything possible to suggest that consciousness might still inhabit that body, that the stillness is temporary, that animation might return.
And when death arrives — as it always does, as it always will — we act shocked. I can’t believe it. That poor man. His poor family.
You can’t believe it? Death is not a surprise. It is the single most guaranteed event in any human life. The timing is unknown. The circumstances are unknown. But the fact of it is not in question — not for a single one of us. Our shock is not ignorance. It is a chosen forgetting.
We meet all change this way. We pretend it isn’t coming until we have no choice but to face it, and then we experience it as an ambush. The denial itself — not the change — is the source of much of our suffering.
But change is not the enemy. Change is what saves us from drowning in stagnation. It is the condition of new life, new possibility, new flowering. Nothing can remain exactly as it is — and if it could, we would perish of boredom long before anything else got the chance to finish us.
The Buddhist contemplation of impermanence is not morbid. It is clarifying. To sit with the certainty of death — really sit with it, not as an abstraction but as a fact about this particular body, this particular life — is to wake up to the preciousness of what is here right now. It loosens the grip. It makes the present moment matter in a way that no amount of positive thinking can manufacture.
Embrace the certainty of change and you embrace the beauty of life itself. Stop fighting what is already here. Open your arms. Let it come.