Solid.  Like a rock.

That sounds good, doesn’t it?  Safe, secure, stable, predictable.

We like predictable.  More than that, we like certainty.  We want to know that things are solid and unchanging.

But that’s never the case, is it?

Very little is certain.  And everything changes. Constantly.  The weather.  The stock market. Our jobs. Our finances. Our relationships. Our fitness. Our health.

The old adage is that the only certainties are “death and taxes.” And the Buddha taught that the only certainties are sickness, old age and death.

It is the clinging to certainty – the clinging to what we think should be certain, the clinging to how we think things should be – that causes suffering.  But how difficult it is not to cling.

Charlotte Joko Beck in her excellent book Nothing Special says this:

“We are rather like whirlpools in the river of life.  In flowing forward, a river or a stream may hit rocks, branches or irregularities in the ground, causing whirlpools to spring up spontaneously here and there.  Water entering one whirlpool quickly passes through and rejoins the river, eventually joining another whirlpool and moving on.  Though for short periods it seems to be distinguishable as a separate event, the water in the whirlpool is just the river itself.  The stability of the whirlpool is only temporary.  The energy of the river of life forms living things – a human being, a cat or dog, trees and plants – then what held the whirlpool in place is itself altered, and the whirlpool is swept away, reentering the larger flow.”

Everything changes. Nothing is solid like a rock.

Joko Beck goes on to say that in clinging – in making proprietary – our own little whirlpools as if they were something of our own, some permanent fixture, we get clogged up, we stagnate. “A whirlpool that puts up a dam around itself and shuts itself off from the river becomes stagnant and loses its vitality,” she say.

It is in the letting go that we create life.  What a paradox.

We have these ideas of how we should be, of how others should be, of how life should be, of how it all ought to unfold.

The challenge is not to get caught up creating these illusory boundaries around our own little whirlpools – our own little concepts and constructs – as if they were something stable and permanent; and instead to allow the flow as part of the river of life.

Pema Chodron writes, “That nothing is static or fixed, that all is fleeting and impermanent, is the first mark of existence. It is the ordinary state of affairs. Everything is in process. Everything – every tree, every blade of grass, all the animals, insects, human beings, buildings, the animate and the inanimate—is always changing, moment to moment.”

The first noble truth, she says, is to recognize that we also change like the weather, we ebb and flow like the tides, we wax and wane like the moon.

How hard it is to allow the ebb and flow.  How hard it is to know that we are the river.

The image is of Split Rock on the Boot Spur ridge.  Even what looks solid isn’t.