Being human causes us to have a complicated relationship to the impermanence woven into the fabric of existence. Humans can embrace change and bravely throw ourselves into new and challenging environments. Yet, at the same time there are many aspects of being human in which we push back against impermanence. We build shelters to create places which resist the fickle turns of the weather. We deploy numerous parks department personal to keep the ever changing shoreline at our beaches from eroding. In our efforts to reduce the effects of aging we pursue an array of youth extending medicines and cosmetic preparations.
When it comes to our lives and especially to the lives of those we love, our resistance to impermanence is probably at its apex. We are all intellectually aware that we and everyone we know will die, but aside from those who have been advised by a medical professional of a terminal condition, most of us manage to convince ourselves that our death and the deaths of people we love will not happen anytime soon. The obvious problem is that sooner or later the people we care about will die, and the tighter we held on to the illusion of permanence the more severe our suffering will be.
What could point us toward a healthier model for accepting the inescapable impermanence in our relationships with loved ones might be found in the way that most people think about their companion animals. Everyone understands that our beloved pets live for a relatively brief time, going from babyhood to senescence in as little as 10 to 15 years. Yet despite their short lives, when we consider all of the love, the patient training, the visits to the vet, the toys and essential care items, the sometimes fussy diets and medication schedules, the pet walkers and/or sitters, and occasionally, the large medical bills, what we do for our companion animals is similar to the kind of investment we might make in a child. Yet unlike our expectations for a child we do not support our pets because we think that we are investing in the future.
We know that our companion animals will not enable our genetic immortality and we do not expect them to succeed in areas or ways that we ourselves had hoped to succeed. We know that no matter how well we train our animals they do not have the potential to one day have a significant impact on the world. Nor do we expect or even fantasize that in the future our animals might be in a position to return our kindness and provide care to us when we might need it. Our relationship with our pets exemplify profound and loving relationships which have impermanence built in. We do all we do for them only for the moment, fully aware that none of it is for an end goal. With a companion animal we cannot harbor the illusion that we are moving towards some sought after destination — all we have is the journey, albeit sometimes all too brief