I have sat for hundres of hours before a white wall—a practitioner of Buddhism through most of my adult life—and there, in that stillness, I have learned what no book could teach me: nothing is permanent. This understanding did not arrive through reason or intellect, but through the patient observation of my own mind. Thought after thought, emotion after emotion, appearing and dissolving. Second after second, the same truth: everything passes.

This, I believe, is the fundamental reality of existence and the root of our suffering—our persistent grasping at what cannot be held. We live as though the city that shelters us, the house we inhabit, our own bodies, our work, our money, our relationships—as though all of it were stable and enduring.

But nothing is. We mistake the impermanent for the permanent, the fleeting for the fixed, and therein lies our deepest confusion.