Can You Name Your Great-Grandparents?

On accepting impermanence and change

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This is an Olmec head that’s been named La Venta Monument 1. Glysiak, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

When I travel somewhere, I try to get hyped by learning about the destination. In December, I’m going to Mexico for the first time, so I’ve been studying Mexican history. I decided to start more or less at the beginning with a civilization we refer to as the Olmec, who lived in what are now the Mexican states of Tabasco and Veracruz. The Olmec were around for more than 1,000 years, from roughly 1500 BCE to 400 BCE, and historians refer to the people living in this area from about 2500 to 1500 BCE as “Pre-Olmec.”

I don’t know much about the Olmecs. To be honest, nobody does. At least when I was in elementary school, I remember learning about one “cradle of civilization”: Mesopotamia, the fertile crescent where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers gave rise to Sumer, Akkad, Babylonia, and many other names familiar to you. But there are now six great cradles of civilization, and joining Mesopotamia (c. 5000 BCE) are:

• Ancient Egypt or the Nile River Valley (c. 4000 BCE) 

• Ancient India, or the Indus River Valley (c. 3000 BCE) 

• Ancient China, or the Yellow River Valley (2000 BCE)

• Ancient Peru (3000 BCE)

• Ancient Mesoamerica, or the Coatzacoalcos river basin (1500 BCE)

The Olmecs arose in the Mesoamerican cradle. Their first capital was located in Veracruz in an area referred to as San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán and it stood for about 800 years.

This was as far into the lecture I got before my brain started veering off the road. Eight hundred years. The United States is only 245 years old. We know very little about them. We don’t even know what they called themselves. Olmec means “rubber people” and was a term the Aztecs used to describe people who lived in this area centuries after the people we now call Olmec had died out. But what did the people we call the Olmec call themselves? We do not know.

I began thinking about impermanence and how the transient nature of just about everything affects our daily life. People, places, emotions, thoughts all come and go. It’s a constant occurrence. But while pervasive, impermanence isn’t a reality that humans are well equipped to deal with. If we were to reduce existence to one basic motive, it would simply be to survive—as an individual, as a group, as a species. 

When I mentioned the Olmec to one friend, he said most people don’t even know their great grandparents' names, and that while maybe entire civilizations are lost over the course of millennia, almost everyone who has ever lived has been forgotten within a few generations. It’s another form of impermanence, and one that I think is more daunting than simple physical impermanence. We’re all generally aware and accept that one day we’ll leave our physical bodies. But it’s much more difficult to come to terms with the possibility that we as a concept, or as a memory, will also fade. Of course, there are countless individuals whose names and deeds live on, but that is most certainly the exception to the rule.

Perhaps a more familiar Olmec from Legends of the Hidden Temple, which featured a talking stone head named Olmec.

Compared to other animals, humans have few physical advantages. In fact, we really only have two: We have amazing hand-eye coordination that allows us to throw things with great accuracy, and we can run long distances without overheating due to our ability to sweat and cool ourselves down. But mentally we have many advantages, perhaps chief among them abstract thinking, which allows us to strategize and think about how to solve problems in the future.

Abstract thinking also allowed us to imagine a world where we didn’t exist. Evolutionarily speaking, “existing” is kind of our thing. That’s what we evolve to do, exist. We’ve acquired a number of traits that are advantageous for existing, and one of them is avoiding things that make us not exist. One of the strategies we’ve developed is to imagine ways to never stop existing or to cope with the reality we’ll one day be gone, which is why people talk about things like “legacies”—as long as we are remembered, we still exist.

So how does this affect how we live our lives? I think there are two paths we can take. We can try to resist the impermanence that is a fact of life, or we can accept it and use this knowledge to make life better now.

This isn’t a post about religion, but I think comparing religions is instructive for illustrating the different approaches. I was raised Catholic, and I went to Catholic schools for 12 years. I feel on solid ground saying that for most Catholics, the objective is squarely to defeat rather than accept impermanence. We call it “getting to heaven.” How often do we see in popular culture the suggestion or hope that such and such person is probably having a drink together up above, or that we’ll see them again some day?¹

Contrast this with the Indian² religious concept of nirvana, which, to vastly oversimplify, is the cessation of the cycle of rebirth and the elimination of suffering. Part of suffering is attachment to worldly things, because all worldly things, both physical and mental, are impermanent. So while reaching nirvana and reaching heaven seem similar, their stance towards people and things are completely opposite. One tries to resist impermanence, one accepts it. Whereas Western religions tend to emphasize a “life” after death, nirvana emphasizes leaving it behind.

Set aside religion, and there are all kinds of secular examples of overcoming impermanence. People build businesses and buildings and name them after themselves often with the express intent of leaving a “legacy” or being remembered. My cousin and I used to debate if we’d rather be an author celebrated while alive and forgotten after death, or be someone like Herman Melville, whose fame largely came after he died. Now, I think that’s a ridiculous question³ on many levels, but if I had to answer it, I’d say that I’d rather enjoy the fruits of my labor while breathing.

So if it’s not apparent, I find accepting impermanence is more beneficial. It forces us to live more in the present with the awareness that someday everything ends, and because of that, we shouldn’t procrastinate, we shouldn’t waste time on trivialities, we shouldn’t waste time trying to resist impermanence. This isn’t just a matter of accepting mortality, it pops up all through our lives. Cultural norms and values change. Music changes, movies change, language evolves. Our bodies change. 

A personal fear of mine is becoming grumpy and bitter through the years. This seems like a ridiculous thing when you are a kid. Everything new is awesome. Now it’s sort of like, “I dunno, do I need another social network? Is EDM really music?⁴ Why don’t they make movies like they did in the ’90s?” Don’t get me wrong, not all change is good. But it is inevitable, and most change is for the better. 

Language is one of the best examples of the inevitability of change. It kind of cracks me up to hear people talk about “proper” English. Language is just the broadly accepted meaning of combinations of sounds and symbols at a given time. Most (maybe all?) reading this would struggle to understand Old English or Middle English. Take the word “happy,” for example, a word at the core of this very newsletter. Have you ever noticed that words with hap in them—hapless, happenstance, mishap—all relate to luck? That’s because “happy” derives from the Norse word happ, which means fortunate. So for whatever reason, a word that used to mean lucky or fortunate has come to mean having a sense of pleasure or enjoyment. There are countless other examples of words evolving over time.⁵

Political geography is another great example. I’m Italian-American. I love Italy and its culture. But Italy didn’t exist as a unified republic until the mid-19th century. Nations change, borders change, demographics change. A couple hundred years ago, it would have been unusual for someone to say they were “Italian.” Someone from Naples would be a Neapolitan. Someone from Sicily, Sicilian.⁶

If you’ve ever visited the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., you’ll likely have noticed this inscription, which is taken from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to Samuel Kercheval on July 12, 1816. Something to think about next time people allude to “what the Founding Fathers would think”:

"I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as a civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."

I think that the ultimate benefit of this acceptance is greater well-being, including becoming more compassionate towards other people. Holding on too dearly to convention or the current state of things leads to rigidity and bitterness, and ultimately resentment. But acceptance leads to growth and understanding, and growth is what we as humans are meant to do.

There are cultures and civilizations that survive longer than others, and that we still know and study. There is value in passing along knowledge and wisdom to future generations. I mean, what I’m writing about here is the result of knowledge passed down over many generations, which I think illustrates another key aspect of impermanence: the difference between selfishness and compassion. A life lived trying to help other people enjoy their life, versus one spent trying to overcome or defeat the inevitable, yields benefits that echo through time. 

I do not mean to suggest here that everything is pointless and we should just pack it up and call it a day. Quite the opposite, in fact. What I am saying is that with the knowledge and understanding that our time is limited, we should live accordingly. Putting an expiration date on something doesn’t devalue the thing, it just means there’s a constraint, and often it’s because of constraints that the most creative and beautiful things happen. We should embrace the constraints.

Take chess for example. Chess is a simple game that you can teach a literal child, and there are constraints on how you can move the pieces. It’s these very rules that have pushed chess players to develop increasingly novel and innovative approaches to the game for a thousand years. There are countless examples in art, business, and even public policy where adding constraints yields more innovative, rewarding outcomes. 

Probably my favorite metaphor for impermanence are the Buddhist mandalas. You may have seen Buddhist monks meticulously placing grains of colored sand in an arrangement, only to be completely destroyed when finished. The circular artworks, which represent a Buddhist ordering of the universe, are intentionally destroyed to symbolize the transient nature of everything, and to emphasize the core belief of non-attachment. Their destruction doesn’t make them any less enchanting, and doesn’t make the act of creating one any less rewarding. It’s like building a puzzle and then just busting it up. There’s a pain that comes with it at first, but seasoned puzzle masters know that it’s the satisfaction of the process that is the true reward.

Photo of a Chenrezig Sand Mandala created and exhibited at the House of Commons on the occasion of the visit of the Dalai Lama on May 21, 2008. The original uploader was Colonel Warden at English Wikipedia., CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

I don’t think accepting impermanence is simple or natural, either. I think it requires effort through meditation and reflection. It’s comforting to be in situations and contexts that are familiar and understood. It gives a sense of competence and control. We’re able to navigate the familiar. But change steals the familiar and replaces it with the unfamiliar, and that comes with uncertainty. Uncertainty, evolutionarily speaking, is not great. 

As I watched the lecture on the Olmec and reflected on impermanence, I returned again and again to the ideas of compassion and self-interest. It seems to me that a world in which people accept impermanence would be a world where people are less egotistical, because they spend less time thinking about how they can perpetuate themselves into perpetuity, and more time trying to improve things for people alive now. Some would certainly suggest that in fact the opposite would occur, and everyone would become extremely selfish, trying to maximize their time, and they’d operate without fear of consequence. But it’s hard for me to accept that, because it seems contrary to experience. 

I wrote this because I know that impermanence is uncomfortable in each and every one of its manifestations. But we can work to become more accepting of change, and that can be empowering and liberating. Yes, there will always be some fear, but with it comes an excitement for what’s next. Yes, there will remain some melancholy for what has passed, but with it comes a greater appreciation for the experience. Managing fear and anxiety will be a bit easier since you’ll know that like everything else, they are impermanent states. But most of all, it will push you to have compassion and understanding for others. John Maynard Keynes said, "In the long run, we are all dead." I say, in the even longer run, the sun eats the earth. And that's totally okay.

1. This is a bit more complex than how I present it in the essay. For the sake of readability, I am simplifying what is a complex and, frankly, difficult to parse view of the afterlife in Catholicism. What I am representing here is the conventional view of Heaven in the way most people talk about it. I think this is sufficient because in this post, I’m really not trying to argue theology. I’m trying to assess how people make decisions in their life and what their goals are. So, the fact that in 2012 Pope Benedict said that the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary “urges us to raise our gaze toward heaven, not a heaven of abstract ideas nor an imaginary heaven created in art, but the true reality of heaven which is God himself. God is heaven” is not really relevant here. But I thought it was important to point out that, yes, I’m aware Catholic theology also talks about heaven as a kind of state of being rather than a place.

2. I say “Indian” here because nirvana is a concept that appears in the major religions that originated on the Indian subcontinent, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism.

3. Writing for glory in and of itself is a bad idea, so really I reject the entire premise of this question now, but that's not the point of this essay.

4. It is music. People have been arguing about what music is and isn’t forever. There was a time when instruments were frowned upon and thought to not honor God.

5. I’m basically talking about descriptivism here. For anyone unfamiliar with linguistics, descriptivism is a view that language is best understood and described by observing how it is actually used, which stands in contrast to prescriptivism, which suggests there is an absolute and correct manner of expression.

6. If you’re not familiar with the history of the Italian peninsula, after the fall of Rome, a series of kingdoms, principalities, and city states vied for power. For example, Venice and Florence were independent republics.