When we were young, it seemed that important things like parents, schools and churches changed very slowly. We were trained by the Silent Generation of the 1950s to avoid trying to change any of them.

Even as grown children, we were advised that parents couldn’t be changed, that those who endeavored to modify parental behavior were doomed to fail. In the 1970s, my brother-in-law sent the then-popular book on “Transactional Analysis” to his aging parents, hoping that they would modify their view of him. He wanted an “adult-adult” relationship with them, rather than the lifelong adult-child relationship his parents preferred. The result was pain, anger and harm to the relationship—but never a change in their behavior toward him.

My father was in the military and we moved regularly, so I was freed of the myth that home would always be there. And yet, for Dad, “Home” was where his parents were. We traveled “home” from wherever we lived periodically, touching base with those things which symbolized home to him: his parents, his family, the Idaho landscape. He kept the myth of a permanent home alive for himself, finally going “home” to die of his colon cancer.

Perhaps my mother taught me most about impermanence. Her parents died young, leaving her an orphan at the age of 10. Beloved by her adoptive parents, she nonetheless fled their rigid boundaries by marrying my much-older father and sharing his vagabond life. Her household rule was that anything we didn’t use for a year was discarded at the next move. We traveled light. Later, perhaps in an effort to find permanence, I married a man raised by aging adult parents in the home into which he had been born. Their home was a clutter of items which were too good to throw away, or which might have use someday. Their memories of the Depression were still strong. Very different from my childhood home.

My current life in a senior community is an opportunity to view impermanence over and over again. Residents move here after painful downsizing—or they pass up the opportunity to move here because they simply cannot downsize. Residents die regularly, and new residents replace them. A new resident once proposed that we establish a “Sunset Committee” to disband committees and groups in which no one was interested. A laughable idea, given that committees and activities come and go in the most natural way possible: their leaders simply die. If no one else takes over, the activity simply ceases to be.

Impermanence is an essential Buddhist doctrine. As we age, impermanence becomes our mantra. Possessions and “home” are impermanent. Health is impermanent. Relationships are impermanent. Life is impermanent. As we age, we become more intimate with impermanence.

The Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh reminds us: “Impermanence does not necessarily lead to suffering. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not.”