This Too Shall Pass

Weekly wisdom to bring you home in 3 minutes.

A SHORT STORY

I spent this past week working on a new piece with Theater Mitu called The Ones — a performance installation that rethinks the future of god. Throughout this work, we’ve been investigating how AI is not an attempt to mirror humanity, but rather the most recent chapter in our ongoing obsession with inventing god.

As I’ve been diving deeper into the research for the piece, I picked up Werner Herzog’s new book The Future of Truth. The question of truth feels especially alive right now — and Herzog’s reflections reminded me of a story from the Buddha.

The Buddha tells of the wisest philosopher in the world, asked to find a phrase that is true in every situation, that always has been and always will be true. The answer:
“And this too shall pass.”

What I love about that story — as I refract it through my own life — is how quietly it speaks to everything. It can be true of grief. It can be true of triumph. It can be true of despair or happiness. All of it lasts less long than you think it does. And eventually, it all passes.

Sometimes it’s only by zooming out — getting a little perspective on your own life — that you realize this is true. And then, zooming out even further, you see that it has always been true, for every person who has ever lived.

What, then, might it mean to hold that truth as we move into the future?

What is a place in your life that could benefit from remembering that this too shall pass?

A POEM

“For the Student Who Said Grammar Doesn’t Matter When People are Dying” by Joeseph Fasano

What can kill is unclarity.
The misplaced modifier, for instance:
Having no hope, the wind didn’t move him.
Did the wind have no hope?
Clearly the writer meant,
Having no hope, he wasn’t moved by the wind.
But someone no doubt had told the writer
about the passive voice, to avoid it
at all costs, like passion,
and the writer, feeling with a chill
how costly life can be
when we are passive (the lover’s last knock
unanswered at the door),
opted for this construction.
Having no hope, the wind didn’t move him.
The difference
is between mystery and confusion,
between the wind’s stillness and a soul
that won’t be opened.
And why not? Why can’t
the wind hope?
I don’t know. I just know
it matters. Everything matters. What is erasing
what. Who is bombing whom.
It took me all day to misunderstand correctly:
Forgetting their children, the conquerors
destroyed them.

Grateful,

Michael