The Illusion Of Permanence

The Greenland shark can live for more than four centuries. Its flesh carries toxins that paralyze if eaten without ritual preparation. In 1816, the year without a summer, volcanic ash from Tambora dimmed the sky across continents. Crops failed in Europe, famine spread, and in New England frost killed the corn in June. The oldest known tree, a bristlecone pine in California, has stood for nearly five thousand years. Tortoises still outlive their keepers. Whales carry harpoons in their flesh for a century. The fact is this. What we call permanence may only be what has not yet disappeared.

And yet we measure everything as if we were the constant. Time is organized by our calendars. Our reigns. Our wars. The seasons are described as though they circle us. We believe the body to be a reliable unit. The mind a sovereign state. But history suggests otherwise. It shows absence as routine. Extinction as ordinary. Survival as accident. The shark lives on in the dark without hurry. The pine tree keeps its rings, silent, while civilizations dissolve.

The paradox is this. What we call inevitability is only what has outlasted us so far, and even that is provisional. Our records are partial. Our definitions temporary. To insist on resolution is to impose order on something that resists it. Weather erases crops. Water drowns cities. Stone breaks beneath pressure. Yet we call the world solid. We call it home.

Abstraction insists on intrusion here. If the body is fragile and the earth indifferent, then identity is not inheritance but interference. We are neither the tree nor the stone but the interval between. The fact of occurrence is not comfort; it is reminder. We are not the totality.

Consider the tombstones leaning in forgotten cemeteries. The names are often gone. Weathered flat, but the stone remains. The marker survives longer than the memory. Does that mean the life mattered less than the inscription? Or does the persistence of stone prove only that we choose the wrong unit of measure?

We are taught to venerate resilience, but resilience belongs more truthfully to geology than to people. Mountains rise without ambition. Rivers cut valleys without strategy. Survival here is not victory but process. Blind. Continuous. The shark is not noble for living four hundred years. The tree does not intend wisdom by standing for five millennia. Purpose is projection.

Still, we project. We cannot stop. We write essays. Carve epitaphs. Build monuments. Create language vast enough to describe the orbit of planets yet insufficient to capture the interior. This contradiction is not failure. It is the law. We are both the ones who vanish and the ones who record vanishing.

Perhaps this is the only constancy available. The act of noticing. To register fact without the promise of conclusion. The shark. The ash. The pine. The stone. They continue whether we speak of them or not, but to speak is to declare that we were here. That we knew enough to measure. To question. To doubt.

And maybe that is all. Not transcendence. Not certainty. Not immortality. Only this. That we knew the earth would outlast us, and still we named it ours.

Maybe that’s the defense mechanism. The human reflex. We construct language to placate against loss. To convince ourselves that articulation equals safety. The world lies to us. Children should outlive their parents. Marriage should last. Love should be enough. Time should mean progress. Suffering should lead somewhere. Hope should save us. But it doesn’t. None of it does. The world keeps turning. Indifferent. And we are left to translate its silence into something bearable.

I once believed all of it. As a child, I tried to organize everything I could. I lined up toys by size. Arranged books by color and height. Rewrote my homework if the handwriting slanted. I thought if I kept things in order, life would stay steady. That if I followed the rules, nothing bad would happen.

What I mistook for control was only delay. A strategy to postpone the inevitable. The human mind mistakes intention for refuge. Vigilance for understanding. Discipline for truth. But these are not solutions; they are the mind’s attempt to find rhythm within disorder.

What follows is the reckoning. Control was never the antidote. It was the illusion that balance could soothe the wound. That arrangement might keep the unknown at a distance. We call it structure, but it is only the choreography of fear. Deliberate. Practiced. Almost graceful.

Still, something in us keeps trying. To arrange what resists containment. To name what has already gone. We trace patterns across the sky, across time, as if recognition could slow the ending. We keep reaching for logic, as though comprehension could soften the loss. And yet we keep watch. Not to preserve, but to remember. To witness the vanishing as it happens. To look once more before it’s gone. To say this was here. That we once belonged.

Today I walked outside, the autumn leaves under my feet soft and brittle at once. The air carried that faint tension of change, the kind that feels familiar but still surprises you. Everything around me was ending in its ordinary way. The trees didn’t resist. The wind kept moving. Only I stood there trying to make sense of it, still reaching for meaning where it wasn’t needed. Maybe that’s what it is to be human, to stand inside the unraveling and call it beautiful, if only because we have no other language for goodbye.